Even as a pure maths student, I've rarely found it useful to have to carry out complicated computations in exam settings. Integrations methods I can even unders

Even as a pure maths student, I've rarely found it useful to have to carry out complicated computations in exam settings. Integrations methods I can even understand up to a point as it is useful for pattern matching – but I had to actually carry out the simplex method on paper in one exam, and worse, I had to memorise several variants of it with different pivoting strategies. Of course, I barely remember how that algorithm works by now. I guess one reason why such computations are asked for in exams, though, is because it gives people something concrete to study so that if they prepare well, they can score some points. If you only have "applied knowledge" exams, they get harder. And somehow, society wants to perpetuate the notion that you can achieve anything if you put in enough effort (no matter whether that effort is actually valuable). In an ideal world, we could instead maybe give students a high level description of the algorithm, have them carry it out explicitly on extremely simple input just to see it once, and then maybe ask them to implement the algorithm in a computer program. Sadly, at least for pure maths students, the coding skills are typically low even when there are explicit CS requirements, don't know what it's like for engineering students.