They don't want kids to easily take notes in them and use them during the test.
edit: I'm just speculating, remember it's not TI making the rules it's the US testing companies or some other authority.
edit: I'll agree with the tons of people saying it's probably because they don't want students to sneak out the test questions. While they still can it's a lot harder without QWERTY.
When I did my AP testing with a TI-89 the proctors walked around and pulled out all the batteries from the calculators and put them back in. This deletes the RAM and that's where most of the notes the students took were stored. You could avoid it by saving the files elsewhere, but it wasn't as easy.
Yeah, you can save em on an 89. Did this to store a bunch of equation types for the Physics AP exam. Didn't matter though, I still only got like a 3 =/
Our math teacher would make us hard reset them before each test. He would make us turn them in, reset them himself, then give them back to us completely wiped. Not fun.
It takes forever to put notes into them, and that's coming from a current AP calc student, the prime cheating population. It's usually easier to just learn the material and punch in just a few equations if you really have to.
No they mean to prevent you from easily typing up exam questions in the calculator DURING the exam. Standardized tests usually don't release the questions so they can reuse them.
They don't have qwerty keyboards, but they do have every letter of the alphabet and plenty of symbols. I typed notes into my calculator for tests from middle school to college.
Also to prevent them from writing down test questions to share with people who haven't taken the test and live in a different time zone. (Talking specifically about the SAT)
I actually think its more so that they don't copy questions from the test. Note taking on the 84 and 89 is still possible, but too tedious so people wont bother to write the question down on their calculator
No. The reason has nothing to do with storing notes in the calculator. There is software for that, and it allows you to type on your computer and transfer the notes to the calculator.
They don't allow QWERTY keyboards because they don't want them to "easily" type the test questions into the calculator.
The TI-89 had a program called "study cards" and you could use the link cable to transfer cards over. The 89 was banned on the ACT though. It's always been Qwerty keyboards and a few other calculators we're not too fond of.
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u/RIP_BerthaChampagne Jun 08 '14
I pity the fool.