It’s been an interesting few months in Calculator Appli cations, ever since word hit the street that the hp32SII was being discontinued by Hewlett Packard. It’s an extremely popular calculator for the contest. In fact, literally every single state meet contestant last year brought one into the room.

There’s a good deal of speculation concerning why this is the case. It could be that the Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) makes the hp32SII blindingly fast on the number crunchers. It’s certainly true that fewer keystrokes are required relative to the Modified Algebraic Notation (MAN) calculators (like the TI 80 series), since parentheses are not used. Or, it could be that less thinking is required, since a person can pretty much start anywhere on the number cruncher with an hp32SII. On at least some TI 80 series calculators, there is no backspace-without-erasure capability, so if someone enters the wrong number of parentheses at the beginning of the problem, they lose all their work in the processing of fixing the error. So the big deal is not hp32SII versus everything else; it’s rather RPN versus MAN.

We’ve had calculators go off the market before but not with the same angst as the hp32SII (remember the hp11C?). The reason is simply that hp until now always had an inexpensive alternative RPN calculator available. That’s not the case this go-round. The only RPN calculator on the hp website is the hp48G, which runs around $150 and is very slow due to its operating method. For example, it takes about 10 keystrokes to convert from degrees to radians.

There was a rumor circulating that the hp32SII is no longer a legal calculator because the Constitution and Contest Rules requires calculators to be “commercially (primarily Microsoft Outlook) to unleash harmful programs on the Internet. The more recent varieties of these e-mail-borne viruses, such as Klez and Bugbear, have some added twists that make them more difficult to stop. spam and viruses, the benefits of e-mail far outweigh the costs. Good preventive measures and a little common sense will help ensure that e-mail remains useful, reliable and valuable for the future.

available”. This is not the case. The intent of the “commercially available” restriction was to prevent students from “souping up” a calculator to gain unfair advantage. That is, the restriction is associated with an individual calculator, not a brand. To restrict calculators based on whether they can be purchased anywhere on test day is incredibly bad policy.

There are calculators that are legal that are helpful to the contest (like unit conversion buttons and the graphing calculators), but I don’t feel they give an inferior contestant much edge over a superior one, and it’s not worth the burden of maintaining a legal list of acceptable calculators or changing the contest to level the playing field. Just acknowledging an advantage is not enough. It should be established that the calculator allows an unfair advantage. I might support a move to outlaw RPN calculators if some objective, believable information arose that they gave contestants an unfair advantage AND the advantage was not easily available to all contestants. In that case, the calculator (not the contestant) would be a significant factor in winning the contest. This is not good. Further, if the perception among a consensus of coaches was that they gave an unfair advantage, then I might support outlawing RPN calculators. I do value the opinions of coaches.

Alternatively, it might be better to level the playing field by changing the Contest to take away any advantage a particular calculator offers. We could do this, for example, by eliminating the number crunchers altogether and/or by developing new problems that require the same number of keystrokes in both RPN and MAN. I intend this year to gather information on the issue. I’ve been talking with participants at the Student Activity Conferences about this, and I will continue to do so. I will want to get input from the TMSCA on the issue, too.

Once that is done, I hope to decide how to proceed. I do not intend to make any changes for the upcoming academic year. The 2003 contest will go on oblivious of the hp32SII fiasco. When and if any response is made impacting the contest, I hope to phase in the changes over a period of time of the range of several years, unless coaches across the state want to move things along faster.