Richmond, Va. – Texas Instruments is replacing thousands of calculators issued to schoolchildren in Virginia after a sixth-grader discovered that pressing a certain two keys converts decimals into fractions.
That would have given students an unfair advantage on Virginia’s standardized tests, which require youngsters to know how to make such conversions with pencil and paper.
At the request of the state education department two years ago, Texas Instruments had disabled the decimal-to-fraction key and left it blank on calculators intended for middle school students.
But in January, Dakota Brown, a 12-year-old at Carver Middle School in suburban Richmond’s Chesterfield County, figured out that by pressing two other keys on his TI-30 Xa SE VA, he could change decimals into fractions anyway.
“His fellow students were so proud of him and congratulatory,” said Michael Bolling, a school official in Chesterfield County, which had more than 11,000 of the calculators recalled.
Chesterfield County school officials held a low-key ceremony to honor the boy, and Texas Instruments sent him a graphing calculator, “which he loved,” said Lois Williams, state administrator in charge of middle- school math.
