Comment by sandworm101

>> if I knew the material so well that I could write a program that didn't just solve it, but showed the work, then clearly I knew the material so well that I'd ace the test even without the program

Lol. So naïve. Half the point of programing and testing the software is so that you can then forget how to do the task yourself. I'd say that 90+% of the task-specific code I've written was for that I no longer remember how to do myself. Once upon a time I wrote a thing to calculate some of the specifics re water hammer effects in pipes. I still have the code but, for the life of me, I have totally forgotten the actual math.