In order to mitigate the chances that my batteries in my calculator will die mid-exam, I changed mine this past weekend. I’m fairly sure that they’ll last through June 1.
Trust me–if you have the TI BA 2 Plus, you don’t want to change batteries mid-exam. You have to have the right-size screwdriver, and even then, it takes a looooooong time. And it causes stress. These are two things which are already working against you on exam day, so go ahead and change those batteries now.
NOTE - this is one distinct advantage that the TI BA 2 Plus" Professional" has over the “regular” 2 Plus. It takes 5 _ seconds _ to change the batteries in the Professional. It takes 10-15 minutes with the “regular”.
I also have the TI BA deuce regular, and yes, it is an unbelieveable pain in the butt to change those batteries. I’ll probably change mine sometime next week. I couldn’t imagine trying to do that during the exam, I was frustrated enough doing it at home.
When I was in B-school, I used my calculator for about two years. Never wore the batteries out. So if you bought the calculator in January, you’re probably okay.
Check this out. It says that a battery should last for 1,500 hours. That’s 1500 hours of calculator-time. I would imagine that if you study for 1,000 hours (across all three levels), only about a third of that is using the calculator. So you might never have to change your batteries.
I bought my old Canon calculator in high school and used it a lot more than for the whole CFA study time. After that, I used it for my university studies. Sometimes I borrowed the battery and used it for other appliances. The battery is still the original one…
The TI calculator I used for CAIA before CFA and it also has the original battery, 4 years and running. So there is no need for you to change the battery unless you are the like the featured guy who took CFA exams 20+ times
Yeah. You don’t need an eyeglasses-type screwdriver, but you need a really small Philips screwdriver.
There are four screws on the back of the calculator’s casing. Take them out. Then you will see the battery, with two wires attached to it. You will need to take the two screws out that hold the battery. Then replace the battery, and put all six screws back in place.
I do not recommend doing this right before the exam, because if you screw it up, you don’t have a calculator. At least if you do it now, you have 11 days to go to Office Depot and buy yourself another calculator.
the TI BAII Plus is such a junky calculator. I hat how half the time the numbers dont register and there is no tactile response. I used the HP 12C for all three levels and thank the RPN entry to easily fly through calculations. If you haven’t studied with the 12c I don’t recommend trying to learn it 1.5 weeks before the exam. It is worth it to learn however once you haver some time to focus on more trivial things
For the record–I disagree with this. I’ve gone through all three levels plus grad school with the BA 2 Plus, and it has more than sufficed. Now that I’m in the workforce, I use Excel for 99.9% of my calculations. I rarely touch the calculator.
Even though I know nothing about RPN, I do not think that it’s worth learning for the exam.
I used be driven mad by the non-registering of keys. I figured out exactly why caused it - typing with two fingers. If you were to hold the calculator in your hand like a cell-phone and punch numbers like you would texting (somewhat quickly) it will not register a lot of the times. If a finger is on a number even for a hair of a second while you push another number, it will not register (other calculators do not do this). So now, I just punch in numbers with my index finger only and it has yet to fail to register. Other than that, this calculator in my humble opinion is superior to the HP as far as capabilities and ease. To me, RPN is just ridiculous. I bought the HP a few months ago, because financiers rave about it’s almost like a status thing to prefer the HP, so I tried that bandwagon. I dedicated a few days to learning it, but I still felt like I was losing a lot by giving up the BA II… For goodness sake the traditional HP doesn’t even have a backspace button. The BA makes use of additional functions which I appreciate - cuts down a LOT of formulas I need to memorize.
Once you get used to RPN, you will find that it is vastly superior to algebraic entry. You just have to get used to it. You never have to use parenthesis and sub-results to large problems are saved in the memory stacks, so you never have to write down or manually store/recall a sub-result when doing real long problems, i.e. standard deviation of a muti-asset portfolio. I had a hard time at first but I couldn’t go back to regular algebraic entry. Also, the TVM functions are faster as you don’t have to hit Compute, like you do on the TI.
Does anyone know if the TI BA II Plus gives a low-battery warning like many of the other TI calculators (TI-83,84, etc) do? Cause that would really eliminate my fears.
