But I once has a math student in my physics class who prefer submitting her assignment typeset in LaTeX. I told her it’s up to her, but it wasn’t a requirement from us. She basically said it would be more difficult to do the assignment otherwise and she would prefer LaTeX instead.

To this day I still don’t understand how it would be easier,l. But I also seen some people prefer doing “analysis” by printing out a plot. To me that’s very inefficient and using interactive plots are much better. I guess the situation is similar, that the ways we think are so different that we can’t imagine how people doing it otherwise would be simpler / better in any way.

(You could imagine carrying the next step in a derivation can be much simpler as you can just duplicate the line and modify from there. Also macros can help. With enough abstraction it could be easier in some way.)

I used to submit math assignments in Word for Windows 2.0 (or 6.0, whichever was current in 1994) equation editor - i didn’t have access to a reasonable latex setup at the time.

The reason was that my handwriting was slow, messy and hard to read. Taking the effort to write a nice “submission” quality assignment would easily take two or three times as much as it would take me using Word.

Thanks for sharing, I haven't thought that could be a contributing factor too. And I appreciate your effort as a former grader—some of the hand writings are impossible to read and they don't seem to put an effort to make my life easier...