Yes, for at least two reasons (I teach among others an undergrad physics class for non-majors).
One is that you should never accept blindly what a device tells you. Students have a great tendency to do just that. Did they enter the numbers correctly?
Does the answer make sense I had one student on a homework-where they can use calculators-tell me that due to slippage along the San Andreas fault the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco would be joined in exactly 635.22723 years! I would rather on an exam that the student show me the ratio of numbers to be divided, for example, even if he can’t do the hand division or does it incorrectly. I don’t take points off if done incorrectly...I just hope he never has his battery run out at an important time.
A more important reason is that electronic cheating by students has gotten very sophisticated and entirely out of hand. Among other aspects, this is a bias against other students who don’t have the monetary resources to invest hundreds of dollars on some of the devices that are now available on the internet. Some of these devices are very concealable and look just like a common calculator.
So im my exams the rule is NO ELECTRONIC DEVICES.
Absolutely correct. I was with a field chemistry class and the students were measuring water quality parameters. They had a pretty good idea about the kind of values to expect, but when they reported one value off by several magnitudes nobody even flinched. So I asked, “What is a reasonable value for this measurement?”, they all pretty much knew and when they thought about it the light went on. Now we've got a bunch of speculation: plant toxins, pollutants, dead animal upstream, etc. Nobody ever hit on the most obvious (and correct) answer - the meter is broken.
And you are right on about the economic bias...
Good point; I used to be able to pass multiple-choice tests involving numbers in subjects matter I knew nothing about easily by tossing the high and low answers, then making somewhat educated guesses on what was left over! In those days (before the educrats got educated), if you had no idea whatsoever, answer “C” was usually a good guess about half the time...
JC