Economy was the one class in university that taught me the importance of software, and the value of creating it: when the teacher allowed for programmable calculators to be used for the exam, my heart jumped: this was an opportunity to do something I loved! And so I did not study for the exam, but instead made myself a basic program for my Casio FX series programmable calculator, so it could easily solve any of the questions the exam might contain. It barely fit the 28KB of the tiny tool, but I got it done and fully debugged in time for the exam.
Then the day of the exam arrived, and opening my exam I saw this would be a doozy: I could have been done in the time it took me to enter all problems into the Casio, and copy down its answers. Instead, I decided to first make the exam myself just using the regular calculator part of my little buddy. I was done with that in about half the time alloted, then double-checked my work with the program and found them all correct. I was the first to leave the classroom, and when the scores came back the exam commitee had added half a point because they deemed the exam to have been too dificult. That was the only time I ever got 10.5 out of 10 points!