[kevindong]

The problem is that not all math problems are worth doing. For instance, when I took Calculus 2/3, some of the homework problems weren't usually hard per se, they were just arduously long. And honestly not really worth doing by hand. If I misplaced a single number and didn't realize it immediately, I would spend the next 10 minutes solving an integral that had no use, plugging it into Webassign for it to tell me I'm wrong, backtrack until I find my issue, and solve the corrected integral. I would usually do this at least once per problem (but usually more like two or three times).

So by the end of the course, I would just figure out the integral (or rather, the triple integral), plug it into Wolfram, plug the outputted answer into Webassign, and if the answer was wrong I'd backtrack until eventually the answer that Wolfram outputs is correct. At which point I'd solve the integral by hand.

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There was one time when the homework problem asked me to find the intercept of this obscenely complex trigonometric equation. I tried for a solid half hour and couldn't solve it, so I went to the math help room to ask the TAs for help. I ended up stumping three of the TAs. A few days later, I went back to see if they had figured it out. Turns out they hadn't. They said we should just use Wolfram to get the answer.