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

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.