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Calculator Policy:

Your high-school math courses probably encouraged you to use calculators, and indeed may have included instruction for the use of calculators. Since high-school math is primarily concerned with computational techniques, this is an appropriate and valuable practice.

Our course will be concerned more with understanding the foundations of the calculus than were your high-school math courses (see the statement of course philosophy), and so we are less concerned about the computational aspects of the topic and more concerned about the conceptual ones. Calculators will not play a role in this class, and you will not be permitted to use graphing or programmable calculators during in-class quizzes and exams (though you may use them on your homework and the take-home portions of the quizzes).

For in-class portions of the quizzes and exams, you may use a scientific calculator that is not a graphing or programmable one. Such a calculator will be able to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, roots, exponentiation, trigonometric functions, and logarithms, but nothing more complicated than that. Calculators of this sort are available at the college bookstore for under $15.

There are several reasons for this policy. First, since we do not enforce a calculator standard on campus, there are a variety of models in use, and this puts some students at a disadvantage (principally driven by economics). Second, as calculators become more advanced, it is more and more difficult to provide questions that are appropriate for use both with a calculator and without one; limiting the use of calculators seems the most practical solution, as this at least puts everyone on an even footing. Third, preparation to use a particular piece of technology is not a goal of this course; indeed any such preparation would probably be obsolete by the time you graduated. Finally, many graphing calculators have sophisticated calculus techniques built in, and using such features tends to obscure rather than illuminate the underlying methods and concepts, which are the main focus of this course.



[HOME] Math 15 (Spring 2003) web pages
Created: 28 Mar 2003
Last modified: 28 Mar 2003 00:00:00
Comments to: dpvc@union.edu
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