As far as infrared communication, they didn't have problems with HP48 like 20-some years ago. i think the rationale was that it only allows limited short range communication, thus was not much of the concern.
Though, I'm curious why some of those "disallowed features" exist, particularly for keyboard and touch input...
They don’t want you to write down full length questions into the calculator for taking out of the test site. It’s just hard enough to type a sentence on the TI-84 that nobody would bother, but a qwerty keyboard that you could touch type on would be a different story.
When I was a student, every middle school student with a TI-83+ was keeping notes in the BASIC editor, and the future programmers were all automating their work in BASIC. Teachers started wiping calculators before exams, and kids started backing up their files to the calculator's ROM to work around it.
Remember, this was the age of T9 typing, we weren't gonna let the lack of a keyboard stop us...
I always found notes and books for open book tests to just make things harder. Sure, a single well made cheat sheat could be invaluable, but in general if you didn't know the material nothing was going to help you if you had to show work, which you do on all non-bubble-sheet exams.
I've only ever had a handful of open book tests in my life, but I just mean that even when you're _allowed_ aids, they're not actually useful unless you have some base understanding anyway.
Though, I'm curious why some of those "disallowed features" exist, particularly for keyboard and touch input...