<p>Yeah, we should throw good practice to the wind because it’s not convenient to learn it now.</p>
<p>Both sides here are being somewhat hyperbolic. I don’t think any experienced engineer could honestly argue that many, if any, situations arise in practice where you need to solve a bunch of problems by hand in two hours with little time to go back and double check. In that sense I agree with </p>
<p>However, the garbage in, garbage out argument is a good one. You often have to do hand calculations as part of determining boundary conditions and other input parameters for your computer models and as part of interpreting the output. If you make a mistake here and don’t catch it, the computer isn’t going to catch it for you. It assumes you know what you are doing and gives you the answer you ask for, even of you meant to ask something else.</p>
<p>Second, you are likely on a team at your job because you have some skill set that adds to that team. Sure there are coworkers there who also get a shot at noticing your errors, but by and large, they won’t be as familiar with your area of the project as you are, do they are certainly likely to miss simple errors as well. You are the de facto expert on a given topic or part of the project and are the most qualified and likely to be able to catch your mistakes. Besides, leaning on the “coworkers can check my work” crutch is a really bad habit to start. You certainly won’t advance very far if all your work must also pass through others before it is usable.</p>
<p>So in short, don’t be too terribly worried if you make a few arithmetic mistakes on exams since you will have more time in practice to check for them. At the same time, don’t just dismiss them either because it is still important that you work on being able to perform accurate hand calculations.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not sure how making a post asking for advice on how to improve could be interpreted as throwing good practice to the wind.</p>
<p>
I was responding to this:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>“Presumably he’s not doing his professional projects in a 2 hour span. Time to check arithmetic in a test is at a premium”</p>
<p>There are times when the ability to determine a solution in a short time period does place your calculation ability at a premium. </p>
<p>I was doing protoflight testing of a large Space Shuttle payload (ie. qualification testing with the actual flight article) when the test data was not matching the pretest predictions. You obviously stop the test at that point. Howver, the test facility and the people (read big $$) are now waiting on you to figure out how to proceed. A few quick hand calculations showed that the FEM model results that were used to provide the predictions to me was in error. A few more calculations and we were able to revise the test setup and proceed (we fixed the FEM model later). Total down time was in the 2 hour range.</p>
<p>Another time I dealing with a nuclear device and the test data was at one end of the expected range of the data. As the test proceeded I was constantly checking the trends in my head to make sure we were going to remain within the allowable range. The techs doing the work were getting a low dose of radiation and I believed that it was critical to get the calculations correct (the radiation levels were being monitored and the techs would have not been allowed to get too big a dose).</p>
<p>I have several other examples. And I’ve been in countless meetings where decisions about how to proceed are being made based on real time calculations being made in the meeting. Of course there is time to go back and check your work (and correct those decisions, if necessary), but in the meanwhile, time and money are being expended on decisions made in those meetings.</p>
<p>Anyways, my advise is to go back and really learn to do your arithmetic correctly. It should have been learned long ago. Not knowing how to add, subtract, multiply and divide correctly will do nothing but hurt your career.</p>