3 ms·

That's interesting and somewhat surprising to me. Do they use slide rules and/or function value tables printed on paper?

ithinkso 5y ago
Not sure about Japan but in Poland the variables in problems are either symbolic and you solve it symbolically, or if they are given as values then they are usually chosen just right to not make arithmetic much of a bother (that actually results in a fun 'sanity check' that if you start getting something waaay crazier than 'normal' you double check if you didn't screw something up somewhere along the way or if there is a better way to solve it). But everyone is taught to only substitute variables for values at the very, very end so calculators are not needed at all. At some point in education there is no point in testing arithmetic skills over and over again, the problems and the methods of finding out solutions to them are what matters
- willyt 5y ago
  Exactly, same in the UK. So a typical first question in the maths exam we take at age 14/15 might be ‘Factorise the quadratic x²+5x+6’. No calculator needed.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Almost same as Japan. If we need calculation (like for some physics exam), we use column method on paper.
- tempodox 5y ago
  That makes sense. If you used a calculator's computer algebra system (CAS) for the symbolic manipulation, it would certainly count as cheating.
willyt 5y ago
We were allowed to use calculators when I took my school exams in the uk. But our exam questions often asked us to give the answers in surds i.e 3/4*√2 not as a decimal which our calculators couldn’t do then. Our teachers told us there would never be a question where the answer couldn’t be expressed cleanly using either fractions or surds, that we should practice doing the maths and show our workings on the exam paper and that if we were using a calculator we were wasting time doing data entry as the actual addition / division / subtraction would never be hard enough to justify it. We memorised a table of surds for 30º 45º and 60º angles but I’ve forgotten why now. Also they hard reset our calculators as we went into the exam.

ithinkso 5y ago

Not sure about Japan but in Poland the variables in problems are either symbolic and you solve it symbolically, or if they are given as values then they are usually chosen just right to not make arithmetic much of a bother (that actually results in a fun 'sanity check' that if you start getting something waaay crazier than 'normal' you double check if you didn't screw something up somewhere along the way or if there is a better way to solve it). But everyone is taught to only substitute variables for values at the very, very end so calculators are not needed at all. At some point in education there is no point in testing arithmetic skills over and over again, the problems and the methods of finding out solutions to them are what matters

willyt 5y ago
Exactly, same in the UK. So a typical first question in the maths exam we take at age 14/15 might be ‘Factorise the quadratic x²+5x+6’. No calculator needed.
fomine3 5y ago
Almost same as Japan. If we need calculation (like for some physics exam), we use column method on paper.
tempodox 5y ago
That makes sense. If you used a calculator's computer algebra system (CAS) for the symbolic manipulation, it would certainly count as cheating.

willyt 5y ago

We were allowed to use calculators when I took my school exams in the uk. But our exam questions often asked us to give the answers in surds i.e 3/4*√2 not as a decimal which our calculators couldn’t do then. Our teachers told us there would never be a question where the answer couldn’t be expressed cleanly using either fractions or surds, that we should practice doing the maths and show our workings on the exam paper and that if we were using a calculator we were wasting time doing data entry as the actual addition / division / subtraction would never be hard enough to justify it. We memorised a table of surds for 30º 45º and 60º angles but I’ve forgotten why now. Also they hard reset our calculators as we went into the exam.