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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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I don't know where you went to school, but in my college I was allowed to use calculators on the math tests. I never did because I quickly realized the professors intentionally wrote problems such that doing math in my head would be easy. Those who used a calculator missed the important crutch of, 'oops, this math is getting hard - That must mean I'm making a mistake' and go back to fix the problem.
Physics and chemistry, dealing with real world constants that are often not particularly around easy numbers, you pretty much need a calculator in order to get anything close to a correct answer. But even then, the correct thing is to simplify without a calculator first before plugging the numbers in.
Yeah, in my science and engineering classes, calculators were allowed, but they weren’t allowed in math classes.
We figured out pretty quickly that calculators were useless anyway because it’s hard to make a scientific calculator solve for the derivative of a polynomial…