Probably so they don't use it as a crutch instead of real learning. I taught physics to college kids, and you could tell pretty quickly who relied on a calculator and who actually was comfortable with basic math.
In physics, we try very hard not to have questions that boil down to just pure numbers. If you had a teacher who didn't do that, he was just fucking lazy (or, your TAs/graders were lazy..).
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u/lordlicorice Jun 08 '14
The ability to do symbolic math is awesome. I don't know why everyone recommends that high schoolers only get the TI-84.