[codetrotter]

I’m wondering too. I remember when I was in HS, one of my teachers said that they could easily spot if anyone was cheating with their calculators because almost all of the students that were not cheating would be focused on reading and writing by hand most of the time, and only occasionally reach for their calculator to calculate something with it. If someone was paying an abnormal amount of attention to their calculator, it could indicate that they had for example put notes on the calculator, or had some extra programs that had features outside of the allowed ones. So then the teacher might sneak up behind the student and have a glance at what they were doing on the calculator.

Also, to try and combat those kinds of things my school always had us show them the list of programs on our TI-84 Plus calculators before a test started, and we had to delete anything outside of what was allowed. That being said I think the calculator can be modded with custom things that could be hidden. So probably the best way of preventing people from cheating was by paying attention to who was using the calculator too much.

[laurencerowe]

In my HS we had to reset our calculators before exams. I wrote a program that displayed the reset screen. I didn’t have anything exam relevant stored on my calculator but didn’t want to lose my copy of the ‘Penguins’ game.

[joenot443]

You must have gone to an excellent high school. I’d be fairly surprised if any classmates of mine had ever installed programs on their calculators, my teacher was pretty surprised when I was showing everyone the game I’d put on mine.

[realo]

The best way to prevent cheating is to forbid all calculators during the exam ...