Heh. I was a TA for a grad school engineering course. The professor accidentally assigned a problem he thought would be easy, but he had a typo and it led to very messy integrals. It wasn't hard, just tedious (think multiple pages of derivations, where at each step the expression was multiple lines long - repeated integration by parts).
He had a policy of no calculators/computer use, but he relaxed it for this assignment as he didn't want students to needlessly suffer.
All the kids that used software (Mathematica and similar ones) got it wrong. All of them. Each and every one made a typo somewhere.
Thing is, had any of these students done a very simple dimensional analysis, they would have known very quickly that their answer was incorrect. I'm sure they would have done that analysis had they attempted solving it by hand. However, people tend to forget sanity checks when working on a computer.
He had a policy of no calculators/computer use, but he relaxed it for this assignment as he didn't want students to needlessly suffer.
All the kids that used software (Mathematica and similar ones) got it wrong. All of them. Each and every one made a typo somewhere.
Thing is, had any of these students done a very simple dimensional analysis, they would have known very quickly that their answer was incorrect. I'm sure they would have done that analysis had they attempted solving it by hand. However, people tend to forget sanity checks when working on a computer.