Policy | Calculator Assumptions

Policy

Calculator Assumptions

The Curriculum Council will publish a table annually which shows the assumptions about student access to calculator capabilities for each accredited subject in each curriculum area.

Tertiary Entrance Examinations will be set based on the assumption that all students have access to an appropriate calculator, with which they are familiar. Care will be taken to ensure that students with more advanced calculators are not unduly advantaged.

Calculator memories will not be required to be cleared prior to a Tertiary Entrance Examination. Students are permitted to take more than one calculator into a Tertiary Entrance Examination. Manuals are not permitted in the examination room.

Tertiary Entrance Examination Calculator Restrictions

Calculators whose operation may interfere with the concentration of other candidates are not permitted in examinations. These include calculators which make a noise, which "talk", which print results on a mechanical printer or which require an electrical outlet. Approved calculators must be commercially produced, battery or solar powered, silent, and hand held. In examinations, candidates are responsible for their own calculators; in particular, batteries will not be provided to candidates.

Calculator cases which are not an integral and fixed part of the device, and external storage media for programs (e.g. card, tape, disk, RAM card, plug-in-modules) may not be taken into an examination. Calculators which are in fact small computers with large storage capabilities will not be permitted into examinations. These include:

• Powerbooks and portable computers
• Pocket organisers
• Electronic writing pads or pen input devices (e.g. the Newton)
  
• Calculators with QWERTY keyboards (e.g. HP-95)
  

Calculators with extensive and sophisticated symbolic algebra and calculus capabilities are excluded from examinations. Examples of such capabilities are the evaluation of indefinite integrals that would normally require integration by parts and the inversion of matrices containing symbolic expressions. Calculators known to be excluded on these grounds include the following:

• Hewlett Packard HP 28 series
• Hewlett Packard HP 48 series
• Texas Instruments TI-92