The calculator inside the runner is section-aware as of this morning. On Data Insights it appears next to the scratchpad — five lines of stacked arithmetic, the same way it has since June. On Quant it does not appear at all. The scratchpad still opens with Tab; the right pane carries a small notice instead of a calculator readout. This is a faithfulness change, not a feature change.
The live GMAT permits a calculator on Data Insights and prohibits one on Quant. A rehearsal surface that permits one on Quant is rehearsing the wrong section. We have known this since the scratchpad shipped; the version of the runner that ships today closes the gap.
The two states
Three differences between the two states.
The calculator pane. Present on Data Insights. Absent on Quant. Replaced on Quant by a small mono plate that reads "No calc — the live test does not permit a calculator on this section." The plate is not dismissable. It is the entire visible affordance the candidate gets where the calculator used to be.
The keystroke. Unchanged. Tab opens the scratchpad in both sections; Tab closes it in both sections. The candidate does not learn a different motion per section. The motion is the same and what it opens is the section's rule.
The scratchpad text area. Present in both sections, unchanged. Free-form typing, per-question state, the same surface the June post described. A Quant candidate still gets the digital booklet; what they lose is the calculator on the right.
Why now and not at scratchpad launch
The scratchpad shipped in June with the calculator always-on. We knew the section split was coming; we held it until two pieces of work landed.
The first was Section Mode going to its own surface in October. A candidate who wanted unlimited Quant rehearsal with a calculator could go to Practice and get it; the dedicated Quant Section runs that opened in October are where the no-calc rule had to be enforced cleanly. Section Mode created the right category for the rule.
The second was the candidate telemetry from the first four months of the scratchpad. We logged how often the calculator pane was used on Quant items versus DI items. Use rate on Quant items was higher than we expected — about 38% of Quant items had the calculator opened mid-solve. Every one of those uses was a rehearsal that did not match test day. The data turned a faithfulness argument into a measurement one.
What is not in this release
Three things we considered and explicitly chose to keep as they are.
The Practice surface is unchanged. The calculator remains available everywhere in Practice, in every section. Practice is not a test-day rehearsal — it is open-ended adaptive work — and the faithfulness argument that applies to Mock and Section Mode does not apply to it. A candidate who wants to learn a divisibility rule under the calculator's feedback can still do that in Practice. They will not be able to do it in a Mock run.
The Data Insights calculator did not move. Same five-line stacked readout, same place on the screen. The change touched only the absence on Quant. Candidates who learned the calc on DI keep the calc on DI exactly as they had it.
The diagnostic stays as-is. The 25-minute diagnostic does not currently include a calculator — it never has — so the rule was already being enforced. The surface that needed catching up was the long-form runner.
Who gets it
Every Mock Exam attempt and every Section Mode run on Quant — across all Pro tiers and Ultra — has the section-aware calculator starting today. No setting to toggle, no opt-in. The runner reads the section it is rendering and the right pane follows the rule.
Candidates currently inside an open Mock attempt will finish that attempt under the previous behaviour, and the next Mock they start will run under the new rule. Same for Section Mode runs in progress.
The next note will be the year-two letter in mid-December.
— Brightroom Product