

Has anyone has this happen at their institution before? If you have any suggestions as to what we can do in this situation it would be greatly appreciated.
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Additionally, students using them often don't need to learn how to perform various calculations and can instead just plug in the various values and have the answer come out. This is obviously not ideal as using these calculators gives students a clear advantage over those without them. If there is something we could do in this regard please let me know. As far as I can tell they are not committing any crimes. We would like to take legal action against them if possible however my faculty and I are unsure if there is precedent for such a thing. Taking action against the group responsible for making the calculators.įortunately this group has been identified, however they are not students at my university so we cannot take direct action against them for academic disintegrity. Asking them to do this without a calculator seems unfair however we can't simply avoid asking such questions if we want to test the students properly. We could try to avoid such things however sometimes it is simply necessary to ask such questions, for example, in an introductory stats class we would like to ask students to find the standard deviation of a set of data points.

We would prefer not to resort to this as we don't think forcing students to do lengthy arithmetic calculations is the best way to test them. We could move to a new model of calculator however I suspect this would only be a temporary fix as the group responsible for modifying and selling the calculators could easily switch to modifying the new model. Additionally, students could still quite easily take a modified calculator of their own into exams and swap it out for the provided one. It would be expensive for the department to purchase enough calculators initially and then they would over time break and be lost, resulting in more cost so we would prefer not to go this route for that reason. This approach, although better than the last, has its drawbacks. Provide our own calculators to the students. We would need to open them all up and look inside. This is impractical as they don't look any different on the exterior and are no different in weight. Here are the options we have considered so far:Ĭheck each calculator individually before tests to see if it has been modified. We have managed to identify the group of individuals responsible for modifying and selling these calculators however we are not sure what to do about it. We have managed to get a hold of one of them and it appears that the electronics inside have been modified. This brand of calculator has limited functionality however recently these calculators have been modified and sold so that students can cheat on tests. Here are the search phrases that today's searchers used to find our site.Recently my faculty (mathematics and statistics) and I have been dealing with widespread cheating due to calculators that have been modified so as to have more functionality than is permitted.Īt my university we have a standardized calculator that is to be used for tests.
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