Calculator Wars at your School

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

I like these thread drifts because they show that even in a massively globalised world and within the same cultural environtment little differences continue to exist :-)

(06-29-2021 01:09 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  Today I use mechanical pencils for everything except signing checks and documents. My wife uses the regular pencils that go in the pencil sharpener; but she lets them get super dull.

My wife also uses regular (wooden) pencils a lot because she teaches art classes at high school so these belong to the tools of her trade. Myself I always carry a mechanical pencil with me together with my fountain pen, but I only use it to take notes for myself, draw (technical) sketches or do calculations. One would never hand something written in pencil to anybody else around here.
And the last time I either signed or accepted a check must be over thirty years ago. I am not sure if one still can get check forms from the bank. And back when they were still common, banks were discouraging their use by charging hefty fees on them.

Coming back to calculators at school/university: we were allowed to use any kind of calculator, programmable or not. In some university exams "pre-programmable" were not allowed. To ensure this, we had to take the battery out of the calculator and place it on the desk next to the calculator before the exam started. In the early 1980ies there existed no calculators yet which didn't lose all their memory contents that way. And card readers were noisy enough to reveal themselves.
Anyway our teachers and professors quickly adapted to the use of calculators by changing the way exams were graded. For the correct numerical result one would get one point out of ten, the other nine you got for finding a good solution for the problem given. That way, even without a calulator - or with flat batteries which happened frequently enough - one could still score almost full points.

Regards
Max