'I said no calculators during the exam!': 17-year-old student maliciously complies with strict math teacher's calculator rule, brings non-electronic calculator to the test

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Nov 14, 2024 4:00 PM EST

One of the most untrue so-called life lessons students are told incessantly in school is to not rely on calculators because they won't always be available. Let's be real: in most instances in this day and age, people have the ability to lean on technology via their phones or computers to calculate something. For better or for worse, that's the reality in the digital age. That's not to say students should not learn how to do math by hand; however, the emphasis in school should more or less evolve with the technology of our times.

This, of course, is something schools have not caught on with just yet. For instance, there is still a non-calculator section on the SAT. Why should the measure of one's competency or intelligence when it comes to mathematics be their ability to act like we still live in the Pleistocene era? We do not.

Here, we have a student who managed to find a loophole in his teacher's "no calculator" rule that resulted in a 98% on his test. Keep scrolling below to see how he pulled this off. For more stories like this, check out this post about a CEO who fired an assistant for spending $2k of the company's money. 

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  • 01
    www Tarth/Done Tarih/Date AUTO POWER OFF M+ M- MRC GT 8 5 96 ÷ X 2 8 ON/AC 03808
    via Unsplash+ (Mohamed Hamdi)
  • 02
    Electronic Calculators are Forbidden During the Exam! tl;dr: Obeyed "the letter of the law." Teacher could not object. S
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    Back in the Dark Ages (e.g., before teh Interwebz or mobile phones), one of my algebra instructors forbade any of us. from using electronic calculators during an exam -- he even wrote it on the blackboard in big letters (see Title of this thread).
    via Illuminatus-Prime
  • 04
    So there I am, in the back row, whipping out the answers faster than anyone else in the class. Teach comes up to me, holds out his hand, and demands I give him my calculator. I hold up my Pickett slide rule and say, "Do you mean this?"
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    "I said no calculators during the exam!" "You said no electronic calculators during the exam. Show me where the batteries go, and I'll give it up."
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    He got a kinda thoughty look on his face and went back to his desk. I continued the test and turned in my answers about 30 minutes before anyone else.
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    When I got my grade back, it was 98% (missed 1 out of 50 due to a slipped decimal point).
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    Of course, there were the usual calls of "Cheater! Cheater!" from the other students, but eff'em -- they shoulda studied harder.
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    McCrotch •20h ago Anybody who knows how to use a slide rule in this day and age, earned it
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    M. 20h ago Edited 4h ago • . I thought you were going to pull out an abacus, but a slide rule is good, too. (I used to own both, but I'm not sure what happened to the slide rule. The abacus broke during a move)
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    Reinventing_W... • 20h ago. When I was in high school [redacted] decades ago, slide rules were about 15 years out of common use.
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    My high school was old enough, however, that some artifacts still remained. I once found a stash of slide rules in a storage cupboard in the math department. (I may, or may not, have liberated some of them.)
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    Some classrooms in the math and science departments still had giant (6 foot long) slide rules above the chalkboards. I had one physics teacher that still used his during lectures. He
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    could whip out calculations on that thing faster than we could punch them into our basic 4-function electronic calculators. (To be fair, he had been teaching the same materials for 30 years, so likely knew the calculations by heart)
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    One of my regrets is that I was not around when that building was eventually remodeled and so missed any opportunity to snag one of the giant slide rules for myself.
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    I have a collection of small slide rules, and I know how to use them. If there's ever an EMP that wipes out our electronics, I'll still be able to design moon rockets.
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    CoderJoe1 20h ago • Ah, before the electric slide became popular.
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    JNSapakoh 20h ago I was hoping for a mechanical adding machine, just deafeningly loud and distracting to everyone else
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    wzlch47 17h ago . I went back to school after retiring from the Army. I had a finance class in which we did a lot of work on things such as loans and bonds. The instructor said that the Texas Instruments finance
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    calculator would be the best tool for the class, but we had the option to use spreadsheets or any other resources to do our work throughout the class.
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    About a week before the final, he gave us a few practice exercises and a basic idea of what kind of problems would be on the test. I was good with the TI finance calculator, but my Excel skills were pretty good
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    as well. My laziness factor (the amount of work done to avoid work, divided by the amount of work that would have to be done without the work avoidance work) was a high number.
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    Based on the practice problems and an idea of what to expect, I formatted a few Excel sheets allowing me to insert a few variables, choose conditions from a couple drop down menus, and let it do the calculations.
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    In addition to the math stuff, there were a few questions that required short answers so I actually had to write that stuff out.
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    The day of the test, I asked if I could still use spreadsheets and he said yes. He told me to email the finished spreadsheets to him, and instead of hand writing the short answers on a hard copy of the test, to just add a word document to the email with my answers.
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    Once the tests were handed out, we had the full 2 hours of class to finish. While everybody else was clicking on their calculators, I filled in the variables for each of the 3 charts and started on the short answer questions in about 3 minutes. The short
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    answer questions were done in less than 10 minutes. I emailed them to the professor, and when he saw that they were in his inbox, I left the final about 15 minutes after it started. I got 100% on the final and an A in the class.
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    A friend in the class later asked me why I didn't share my spreadsheets with everybody and I asked why he didn't make spreadsheets and share them with me.
    via Illuminatus-Prime

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students malicious compliance malicious-compliance-reddit teacher high school reddit thread Reddit Terrible Teacher math immature high schoolers
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