Re: NCESS Exam - Would you have time to enter the Q's?? Message #15 Posted by CME750 on 17 Sept 2003, 4:19 p.m., in response to message #1 by Bill (Smithville, NJ)
NCEES claims that a skilled typist can, with practice, learn to enter text rapidly, even on a non-QWERTY calculator keyboard. It is unlikely that you would be able to do this and still work out the answers to the questions. However, a dedicated professional cheater could, in theory, take the exam solely for the purposes of copying it; it wouldn't matter if he failed.
NCEES doesn't release copies of their old exams. They apparently like to reuse questions, or rework them slightly, between exams. So they don't want their questions to become general knowledge. They apparently believe that cheaters would be able to sell genuine NCEES test questions for major $$.
NCEES acknowledges that the stock HP48 IR port has a very limited range. However, a few years ago, someone on comp.sys.hp48 claimed that you could increase the IR reception range to many feet by simply changing a capacitor or something. This may be a legend; as far as I can tell, no one has ever successfully communicated between HP48s at any significant distance with IR. But NCEES is totally spooked by the claim.
NCEES only cares about what you take *out* of the exam room in your calculator, not what you bring *in*. The PE exam is open book. In fact, companies like Chotkeh.com have historically marketed PE exam software for the HP48.
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