That’s interesting that you are still using it in grad school. I am pretty sure I can count the number of times I touched my calculator in grad school on one hand. I haven’t used it in years as all of my calculations that would require it have moved over to the computer and programs like Matlab.
There’s still in class exams where the calculator is needed as well as a take home portion to the midterm that requires the problems be done in MATLAB
My experience was the same as @boneh3ad, I almost never used a calculator in grad school, and when I did, it was a TI-30Xa. The only class where I really had to use it, IIRC, was a course on numerical methods, which involved setting up an algorithm correctly, then doing a few iterations by hand (ie, by calculator) with numbers. Many of my professors didn’t allow calculators at all, during exams.
However, in this day and age, I’m not sure why you’d even want to use a calculator on an assignment to do things like integrals or linear algebra when you can so much more easily type it into Wolfram Alpha, which will solve and/or plot any symbolic problem/equation, or when you can compute/solve/plot it in Matlab or Python or something. I don’t think I’ve touched my TI-89 since freshman year of undergrad.
I think I probably used my TI-89 Titanium all through undergraduate and then nearly completely shifted over to using Matlab on my computer for pretty much the duration of my PhD. I am trying to recall whether I ever needed a calculator on exams in graduate school, and I am pretty sure the answer is pretty close to no.
At the undergraduate level, I definitely wasn’t allowed to use calculators in any of my math courses. I don’t honestly remember whether I was allowed to use them in my physics courses. I remember that I definitely was allowed to use them on pretty much all of the engineering courses.
In the courses I am teaching now, I am trying to deemphasize the use of calculators. At the end of the day, in the real world, everyone will have computers or calculators to solve the numerical part of a problem, so it really doesn’t tell me much that a student can plug in numbers and get a correct answer. The real challenge (and the real point of the class) is being able to derive the equations/expressions into which those numbers need to be plugged. That tells me a lot more about what a student understands and whether they know how to set up the problems and make appropriate assumptions than just plugging and chugging on a calculator.
I ended ended up getting the ti 84 + CE because of the good deal at target. Thank you for the help!
If you go to a community college they will more likely let you use a calculator in math classes.
In regards to the units comment. You can check units without assigning values. If you know what each variable means you can deduce the units for that like in a Center of Mass problem. The more comfortable you are without a Calc the better off you’ll be.
@eyemgh You summed it up pretty well. I’m a second year and the other poster is a 4th. We go to different schools and take different classes. Explains our differing povs pretty well.