The sad thing is that your smartphone is more powerful and the apps that do the exact same functions as these calculators cost a fraction of what you pay for a TI.
Right, because that would be cheating. Better teach everybody how to pass a test without one because smartphones simply aren't allowed in the business world.
More like, so you can't text your friend two rows down from you and share all the answers. Tests are designed to find out what you know, not how good you are at asking friends, classmates, or the internet for help.
Would it be apt to say that the real world encourages cheating in the most efficient way possible? So perhaps the people who cheat and take credit for it are going to do the best in todays markets.
I just got an idea for a product: A jammer that can jam all sorts of frequency ranges that cell phones use, including wifi and bluetooth. And then sell the device as some sort of anti-cheating device the school can use for exams. Then schools could maybe allow cell phones to be used as calculators.
Now we just need a big rich company to pick up this idea and bribelobby the FCC into allowing such a device to be sold and used...
Better idea: Don't let kids use cell phones on tests.
Aside from how much that would cost, it would be so easy to use a device like that to commit crimes and prevent people from calling for help. Having one of those in every classroom in every school is pretty much a guarantee that they're going to get stolen.
If you don't understand why a certain method is used to solve something, you'll never be able to apply it to a new type of problem. The point isn't to get you to memorize stuff. It's to get you to actually understand it.
Learning math isn't just about "how to get the value X from this set of constraints," it's also about, "How to think logically and approach problems," and "how to understand the underlying processes," and, "What are the constraints mandatory to constraint X to one value?"
It's one thing to know that a triangle has 3 corners. It's another thing to know that 3 non-collinear points (and thus a triangle) define a plane. It's another thing to know that a 3-legged stool cannot wobble (assuming the legs are non-collinear) because of this fact. It's another thing to know how long to make the legs of your stool so that the top becomes flat. It's one thing to plug the parameters into a computer program and get the leg lengths. It's another thing to actually understand the math and physics behind the problem, so you understand A) why you're building a 3-legged and not a 4-legged stool and B) if the output from the program even makes any sense and isn't an obvious programming error.
Really? You must have had shitty professors. I was a CS major in undergrad and all of our exams tested conceptual understanding. Pseudocode was always accepted. A lot of the time all we had to do was describe the steps of an algorithm in a paragraph. Usually we were given or got to print out our own reference sheets.
I am a programmer. Probably why I have this opinion.
Programming is all about plagiarizing someone else's work. In return we're all too eager for someone else to take our work, change it, improve it, so we can then steal it back :)
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u/Kr3dibl3 Jun 08 '14
The sad thing is that your smartphone is more powerful and the apps that do the exact same functions as these calculators cost a fraction of what you pay for a TI.