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Comment by timthorn | Hacker News Reader

> Oh, it's sqrt(2), I probably didn't make an error in the calculation

You remind me of my university maths exam. In all the past papers, the eigenvalues came out to be round numbers. But in the real paper I sat, no matter how many times I tried to find my mistake, they didn't. I wasted hours of the exam on that.

It was the professor's final year before his retirement.

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The year that I took AP Physics, every single piece of study material and practice test exercised only really simple math - small numbers, everything cleanly worked out into integers, etc etc. I did almost everything in my head or with quick notes on paper. This pattern was so consistent I almost didn't bring my calculator into the actual exam because I hadn't needed it all year, and grabbed it only at the last second "just in case".

Turns out that was not a design goal of the real exam and basically nothing worked out to neat, small integer solutions - I probably would have hard failed without the calculator. I'm still sort of confused why prep materials and the real exam diverged so much.

I had a university exam where my calculator literally didn't work. I put a note on the paper to that effect and worked out as far as I could by hand without actually giving any of the final answers. Given the test was about knowledge and not the precise answers, I don't think it harmed me any (my grade was over 80%).

I passed my physics classes refusing to evaluate the final expressions, after all that's what calculators and computers are for. I don't feel that had a huge impact on my grades either and my sanity/stubbornness went unharmed.

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