hi gail,

thank you for pointing that out! that was our mistake—alphabetic keyboards are allowed, as with the ti calculator you mentioned, but qwerty keyboards aren’t allowed. i’ll fix that mistake now. i also appreciate your feedback about how useful calculators can be. i do understand that a calculator can be used for a number of questions on the test, but in most cases you cannot rely on the calculator alone (even if it is a very nice calculator), and the tasks that the calculator can help with are fairly straight-forward. the more challenging questions on the sat are difficult in ways that calculators rarely help with, in my experience, because they focus more on seeing patterns or understanding how to manipulate information, rather than on simply solving for a variable. i can tell you that i took an sat just a few months ago, and i only used my calculator two or three times during the test, and it was only to double check my math. there were a few other questions that i could have used it, but it would only have slowed me down. you’d be absolutely right to point out that i’m a teacher with years of experience with sat math, so that’s not a typical case (i absolutely recommend that students have a calculator and know how to use it to it’s max potential), but that’s where some of what i say in this post comes from. 🙂 thanks again!