C'est magnifique mais ce n'est pas la mathematique

I got my first MST221 TMA back yesterday, 95% which is a cause for much tail-wagging in the dragon household ( we do not sing when happy - despite what that film might have said - but our tails do tend to wag which is unfortunate for any small animals or trees in the vicinity; do not stand behind a happy dragon ).

However there was one or two questions where I got full marks, and I don't think I should have done because I really didn't do anything to deserve them.

There's a question in TMA02 as well that I guarantee I'm going to absolutely ace and all I did was press a few buttons on a computer, something I do for a living most days, and fire off a few printouts. Question one took an hour of fiddling with some rather torturous algebra, question two took 10 minutes of keying in a formula into a pre-built spreadsheet and then setting a couple of parameters. Yes its quite wonderful but it's not maths.

In this green scaly creature's opinion using Mathcad in the course is fine enough but it should be used to illustrate and expand on the subject at hand - it's good at that, especially when it shows 2-cycles breaking down to 4, 8 and then into the chaotic region. What it should not form is part of the assessment. All testing me on Mathcad does is prove I can amend a pre-existing mathcad sheet and get some different numbers to come out.

Oh and Mathcad is a sucky, bug ridden piece of 1990's vintage software as well. I have to run it on a virtual XP machine on my main PC otherwise the second I touch the scroll wheel it freezes.