Use of calculators on exams/in class

Murphy Waggoner (waggoner@STORM.SIMPSON.EDU)
Tue, 16 Apr 1996 22:09:29 -0600

A discussion has been going on about instructors that do not allow the use
of graphing calculators on exams. I personally would love for all of my
courses to incorporate the graphing calculator (TI-85 is our calculator of
choice) in class, out of class, on exams, etc. Due to administrative
reasons I am not allowed to require an approximately $100 calculator in a
course that is not a majors course (the reasoning being that the student
will never need the calculator again, which I don't agree with).
Therefore, in the non major classes some students have graphing calculators
and know how to use some functions, some students have graphing calculators
but don't know how to use them except as a scientific calculator, and many
students do not have a graphing calculator.

Of course, I let those students who have the graphing calculator use it in
class (or out of class for that matter). The problem, however, is how to
write an exam that is calculator independent, i.e., how does one write an
exam so that the students with a graphing calculator do not have an
advantage over those that do not? One response to this question is "Have
them show their work." So, for example, is a student is to graph a
parabola, then the student must show some justification for the graph such
as calculations of intercepts, vertices, etc. or derivatives and sign
charts. Yes, that would mean that all students must do some calculations
by hand (or equivalently, have the calculator do some calculations for
them). But I believe that even in this case the GC student has an
advantage because they have an outside source that will verify for them
that their graph is correct while the nonGC student does not have that
safety net. I do not believe this is equitable.

Another option is to ask many concept questions and design questions that
cannot be done or verified on the calculator (for example, in calculus the
student could be given graphs of f' and f'' and certain points for f and
asked to graph f). The problems with this is that there is not (yet) a
repository for these types of questions available to the student or the
instructor. While a traditional text may have 20 traditional graphing
problems in the exercise set many texts only have a couple of
nontraditional graphing problems in the exercise set (for "good" reason,
one nontraditional GC-independent problems may take up as much space as the
20 traditional problems in the text). Therefore, to make such exams and to
prepare the students takes time and ingenuity (of which I have seem to have
at most one of at any time).

I believe more instructors would allow students to use calculators on exams
if we could provide them with more support including test banks, better
texts, training, etc.

Murphy

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Murphy Waggoner
Department of Mathematics
Simpson College
701 North C Street
Indianola, IA 50125
waggoner@storm.simpson.edu
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