<p>I'll be a freshman this fall, and I'm trying to decide what to do about a calculator.</p>
<p>I've taken a year of calculus in high school, which loosely follows the AP Calc AB curriculum. Since my class was not technically AP, I really don't know how well I'll do on the placement test. The idea of calculus isn't completely foreign to me, so I'll probably place into the 150 sequence.</p>
<p>My question is this: Are calculators allowed in the 150 sequence? I've heard of some college calculus courses that don't use calculators, and plenty of others that do. My TI-84 has seen better days, and I will get a TI-89 if I'm allowed to use it.</p>
<p>For what it's worth, I will be an Economics major.</p>
<p>Almost certainly not. Our calculus courses focus on concepts, not calculation, so you shouldn’t need a calculator for the work. </p>
<p>Of course, having a calculator is often convenient when you’re working with integrals, et al., and when you won’t need to show your calculation. This might be quite necessary if you want to do some work in applied mathematics/econ/statistics/whatever. Of all the math courses I’ve taken here (which would be, after this quarter, 10), I’ve never been “allowed” to use a calculator on the problem sets or tests (all calculations usually need to be shown explicitly), although I found it quite useful when I wanted to check my work in PDEs.</p>
<p>Other than a basic scientific calculator to add decimals and take square roots of random numbers, there is no need for a graphing calculator in core calc. It is anathema to the entire curricular leadership to let you utilize the integral solver functions and such that most Texas Instrument products come equiped with. Indeed, I found most problems were complex enough that without significant simplication they caused TI products to crash. </p>
<p>As for the TI-89 for statistics, again, not needed as far as coursework goes. You will end up using STATA instead when you need to quickly churn out summary statistics for some empirical problem set. Meanwhile, exams will be almost entirely done in undefined variables. Same story in econometrics.</p>
<p>S1 is a first year math major. Don’t think he has used his calculator all year. Heck, the only numbers on his p-sets are page numbers and problem numbers!</p>
<p>but it is still worth it to bring along my lovely TI-84 Plus right?
I’m thinking of Econ but other than that you need it for regular coursework right?</p>
<p>It’s worth bringing along whatever calculator you used in high school math just to have for reference, but definitely not worth buying a new or fancier calculator for college courses, as you probably won’t use it. I took Calc 130s, the lowest-level and most calculator friendly calc course, and even then wasn’t allowed to use a calculator on tests and had to show my handwritten calculations anyway, so my TI-89 really only ever got used ot check my arithmetic :)</p>