"Paul J. Adam" wrote:

snip

Ed's point is spot on - you need an idea of roughly what the answer
_should_ be, before you slip the sticks or spin the dials. Electronic
calculators are worse because people tend to believe the answer,
regardless of precision or magnitude. Am I the only person who's seen a
fellow student report a result that not only had the decimal point in
the wrong place, but was to eight significant figures "plus or minus
40%"?

I can't recall anything that bad (but maybe I've forgotten some of the more
interesting results from chem class), but I do remember way back when learning
resistor color codes, seeing people in the class answer a set of test questions on
basic resistor color coding and tolerance, i.e. what is the nominal value and
tolerance of this resistor, and what are the minimum and maximum values acceptable
given the tolerance. Most people used a calculator (I didn't as it was faster to do
it in my head; how hard is it to calculate 1, 5 or 10% tolerance?). One guy was
representative, coming up with answers like the following for a 300 ohm, 10%
resistor: low and high values of 2.7 ohms and 330,000 ohms. Purely because he (and
they) didn't think, but just wrote down whatever answer the calculator gave them.

To be sure, a lot of them had poor basic math skills to start with, which I, being a
cranky, relatively young fart at the time, put down to them never having to learn
to do basic math in their head or by hand in elementary school, so they had no idea
whether the answer made any sense. But what can you expect in a state where the
public teacher's unions complain that because too many of their members can't pass
the math, english and other competency tests, they should be made easier, despite
the tests having already been dumbed down first to 11th and subsequently 8th grade
level? One suspects that they too 'learned' to do math with a calculator, assuming
that they ever learned at all.

Here ends my 'everything's gone to hell in handbasket since my day' rant. Honesty
compels me to admit that I only had to walk between 1 and 2 miles each way to
school, that it was only uphill ONE way, that it never snowed (this is the San
Francisco Bay Area), and that gas-fired central heating, electric lighting and hot
and cold running water was provided.

Guy