Looks like she tried to put in the entire problem at once in the calculator. How she did that with a bar graph is beyond me.

The reason they even let you use calculators is because doing basic operations by hand is time-consuming, which means less time to demonstrate the more advanced skills that are actually being tested. Many college courses involving math will actually set limits on how powerful your calculator can be so the problems aren't too easy.

Can we guess the calculator model from this error message? I assume Casio Natural VPAM series ("Syntax" in lower case, "ERROR" in all caps). Older Casio models (like my FX-100W) displayed shortened message "Syn ERROR". Never used american calculators (TI or HP) so can't say for sure, but quick googling shows either "Syntax Error" or "ERR: SYNTAX" or "SYNTAX Error".

Allexedge said:

Can we guess the calculator model from this error message? I assume Casio Natural VPAM series ("Syntax" in lower case, "ERROR" in all caps). Older Casio models (like my FX-100W) displayed shortened message "Syn ERROR". Never used american calculators (TI or HP) so can't say for sure, but quick googling shows either "Syntax Error" or "ERR: SYNTAX" or "SYNTAX Error".

I have a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition and it says:

ERR:SYNTAX
1:Quit
2:Goto

though I don't know if that's the case for all TI calculators.