Comment Re:It's only fair. (Score 1) 235
When I was in grade school, calculators weren't allowed until 7th grade (strictly banned from elementary school). Even then, they had to be simple calculators that couldn't solve complex problems (graphing calculators were strictly disallowed until high school). Approaching it like this forced the students to learn to do new kinds of problems by hand. The expectation was that by the time tools were given, students should already know how to accomplish the same things their calculators do for them.
I don't know whether that's how calculators are still used in grade school or not, but it ought to be (in my opinion).
The same should apply for using spell check on exams. If they're at a level where they should be familiar enough with spelling to do so with a reasonable level of accuracy, then I think a spell checker should be okay.
What concerns me is that once spell checkers are introduced all of the time, the students may start to learn new words and not even attempt to learn to spell them properly (spell checker will do that for them, right?). For it to be equivalent to my logic on calculators above, the students would need to learn to spell the new words properly before being allowed to spell check them. Which isn't realistic to monitor or force upon students, unfortunately.