Casio fx-50F/fx-50FH programming

[David22]

(08-21-2020 02:00 PM)Albert Chan Wrote:  I am on the opposite camp. Calculators should be banned in exams.

Why do students that can afford a programmable calculator have the advantage ?
Or, worse, a cheating calculator ...

Answer is considered correct if you write the steps, leaving the arithmetics un-calculated.
You get bonus points if you can estimate the result.

Today programmable calcs are cheap, at least in not very poor countries (you must relate price to income), and there is a big 2nd hand market, so I think owning one is not a problem in most countries.

On other side I think part of the problem is with cheating, from including a lot of information on internal memory on standard machine to modified machines with even more memory or even wireless comms capabilities. This is a reason to ban a lot of calcs (all having dot-matrix displays).

Also I see a other problem with calculators which can do a lot work, work some students doesn't how to do.

For all those reasons I think only 7-segments calc would be allowed in exams: they free you from tedious arithmetic calcs, but you can't cheat with them as there is no text (even if they are programmable), and they give instantaneous results as you press keys (i.e. you get intermediate results as you do it).

I think those instant result calcs (they give result as you press keys; for example you press SIN key and they answer with sine value), are better for learning because you see results on operations. For example, when you are young you press 1/x and you see inverse, you press it again and you get previous number: you see in practice characteristics of inverse operation. In a modern calculator you introduce a formula and you don't see those effects, you learn nothing with them, you can't play with numbers with them.

Even it could be acceptable a 7-sgemsnts display with a small text area, with maximum 4 chars to show program or extra information (for example modes, matrices editing, etc) or error information. Some old Casio had this 4-chars area (for example fx-180P Plus, fx-3900Pv). With 4 chars text it is really impossible to cheat in a good way. Even with 7-segments you can do matrix operation (HP15C is an example), and you can include 2 lines of 7-segments with extra symbols to easy operation on matrix, programming, etc, without cheating possibilities.

Of course today calc industry is on other way, and cheap 7-segments calcs is little money to gain for them (except for venerable and expensive HP12C, longest live calc in history ).

(08-21-2020 02:00 PM)Albert Chan Wrote:  On the other hand, a correct numerical result without showing why get no points.

Of course, in a normal (no select-answer) exam it is simply zero points.

But I made select-correct-answer exams in some high grade subjects, so there you only choose a solution from for example 4 provided correct/fault solutions. And an exam like those can be even harder than a normal exam if they want to do so (even if they point up no answered questions; of course incorrectly answered questions get negative points, so you must only answer when you are confident about solution).