I don't know what happened to that student (I'm guessing not in a field commonly using math ??), but my experience as a student with access to calculators during exams (sometimes even to programmable calculators) is that they were just slowing you down for simple calculations, resulting in a worse grade if abused, especially since you have to lay out all the intermediate steps anyway. (And you just figure out with experience what the cutoff for 'simple' is, and it raises as you keep getting better at it, just as the bar to what is considered a minimum 'intermediate step' raises with the class level.)
But then also the importance of using a calculator as one of the tools to double-check your work (because they make much less mistakes) should not be underestimated... whereas the situation seems to be opposite with LLMs !
Same. In secondary school, calculators was mostly about the trig functions and operating on big numbers. In primary school, you wouldn't have access to a calculators in exams so you learn how to do without. And in university, I mostly had to deal with symbols.
But then also the importance of using a calculator as one of the tools to double-check your work (because they make much less mistakes) should not be underestimated... whereas the situation seems to be opposite with LLMs !