Comment by sosborn

2 days ago

CAS capabilities are prohibited in the SAT: https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/what-to-bring-do/calcu...

6 comments

sosborn

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hatsunearu  2 days ago

Wow, they used to be allowed back when I was in high school. It came in super clutch for SAT but much more importantly AP. Our school mandated the original CS CAS and drilled us on how to use it effectively and I got good mileage out of it through high school testing and college.

I lost it at some point and got the version 2 and I would occasionally use it for work. I wish it had USB-C because who has a mini-B cable for charging these days

  • frostiness  2 days ago

    As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.

  • peesem  2 days ago

    CollegeBoard only seemed to realize recently, the ban on CAS calculators on the SAT, PSAT, and AP exams came last September if I remember correctly, maybe August or October

  • BoorishBears  2 days ago

    I vaguely remember they were banned by a proxy that stopped working after the Ti-89 came out: no QWERTY keyboards

    Originally that blocked the Ti-92, but then the Ti-89 and Nspire line had numeric keypads + CAS

    • z2  2 days ago

      Ah yes, I had a 89 Titanium (bought with the funds from a math prize) that felt like sanctioned cheating for College Board exams. The year I took the AP physics test, there was a surreally difficult integral or differential equation that I owed completely to the calculator. I never did as well in math competitions since getting that thing, but no regrets.

deckar01  2 days ago

They let you write python programs as long as it’s from memory though. I wonder what the code golf looks like for a rudimentary python CAS. If you could evaluate the equation without needing to parse it, I bet you could get a lot of mileage out of a black box gradient decent routine. The analog circuit solver I wrote for my nSpire (without CAS) was ~11kB. https://github.com/deckar01/pylacc