[FirmwareBurner]

Wouldn't it be easy to have a exams without calculators? Or on dumb terminals that only have basic apps like calculators on them?

Where I grew up, exams disallowed any calculators or any kind of other electronic devices. From what I see, using calculators at exams is mostly an American thing.

[seanhunter]

It depends on the subject. Here in the UK calculators are absolutely expected in most STEM exams for high school and university.

For a trig exam for example if you don't allow calculators you are very limited in terms of what you can do. You could do a lot of trig identities etc but all the problems with a concrete answer would have to boil down to some sort of 30/60/90 or 45/45/90 right triangle. It's not reasonable to expect people to be able to calculate exponents and logarithms in their heads either beyond very simple integer bases and small powers. Forget about natural logs for instance. Likewise anything which depends on trig, exponents, logs etc eg converting rectangular complex coordinates to polar, adding vectors fitting any kind of exponential model, etc.

For a stats exam calculating things like standard deviation etc are almost unbearably tedious with a calculator let alone without, but you do need to be able to demonstrate you can do it.

[wiredfool]

They’re definitely used in the UK gcse and A level exams.

[ivanhoe]

I imagine some engineering exams would be very-hard to do without them, if you want to keep realistic the values and the complexity. You don't want people to waste the time on crunching large decimal numbers and solving trigonometry, it would take away from the exam itself.

[flanked-evergl]

I think the chance that the person creating the "dumb" terminal is more competent at locking down the system than students are at breaking out of the "dumb" terminal is low. I work at a bank, and they have layers and layers of lockdowns for employees that take a couple of minutes to defeat with almost no skill. I doubt schools will do better.

[foobarbecue]

The GRE has been on computer terminals since forever (at least it was when I took it in 2012). Lots of standardized testing is.

If you don't include WiFi hardware, and don't plug in an Ethernet cable, cheating would be extremely difficult to say the least.

What sort of "defeat" are you taking about?

[FirmwareBurner]

What's there to break out of a Windows XP PC without network connectivity?

[glimshe]

XP has vbscript in the command line, giving you more processing power than a standard calculator... Not that people would have time to code, but maybe there could be an advantage to be had. A custom Linux build would be easier to lock down, I think.

[FirmwareBurner]

That's what human proctors/supervisors are there for at exams.

Exams problems are designed to make use of only basic scientific calculator features, I doubt you have the need, or the time, to start sneakily writing VB scripts to try to gain an edge, while the proctors are not looking.

[flanked-evergl]

If someone is using Windows XP in any official capacity in 2023 they should be summarily terminated for gross negligence and sued for damages.

[FirmwareBurner]

It was just an example of how exams that required calculation aids were in my school back in late 2000s.

Feel free to adapt it to modern days but the concept stays the same.

[djaro]

Graphing calculators have a lot of features, and since students also use them during lessons it would be very difficult to suddenly use an entirely different interface during exams.

In the Netherlands we also had to have calculators during exams, because some questions just need a calculator to be solved. Especially for stuff like calculus plotting graphs is really useful.

[signal11]

Many countries allow calculators, even at board exams held for 15/16 year olds.

I didn’t need a very advanced scientific calculator, in the exam it was mostly used as a replacement for log tables (remember those?).

[RecycledEle]

Most exams now have an on-screen calculator and do not allow physical calculators.

[broken-kebab]

I think it's worth keeping in mind that HN is visited by international audience, "most exams" will be clearer with geographical attribution. I guess most exams worldwide are pen-and-paper (which is not necessary bad, btw)

[wodenokoto]

We had two written. One with and one without. It’s different types of problems you can solve.