Comment by JonnieCache
14 years ago
Hah, this exactly mirrors my experience in chemistry lessons aged 15. Failing to reproduce experimental results with broken equipment then faking the data with an excel function to get the teachers off my back so I could go back to doing something useful like staring out of the window, or using the magnesium ribbon to heat-seal peoples pencil cases shut.
Good to know that it carries on up to the undergraduate level. And I even managed to associate with women during my eventual CS degree! Feeling pretty smug right now.
Failing to reproduce experimental results with broken equipment then faking the data with an excel function to get the teachers off my back...
I had the exact opposite experience. I once failed to get an experiment working, but kept trying until I was the last person in the lab. Eventually the professor asked why I hadn't finished, and together we discovered the spectrometer was utterly broken.
He gave a a grade of 0-25% to everyone who got the "right" answer, depending on how realistically they faked it (some people didn't bother to add noise or quantize their answers).
My EE professor in Dynamic Fields, halfway through a 3 hour lab, announced to the class "Oh, by the way, anyone who gets a right answer gets an F for the lab." Groans from half the class. "The point of the lab is to show how danged difficult it is to get to the right answer".
I looked at my mess of data and chuckled.
Your own example suggests you're in the (vast) minority.
Eh, in my experience, despite the fact that points were not deducted for getting the "wrong" result, and they were frequently told so, students still preferred to falsify data.
I think it is because if they get the "correct" result they can also just copy an analysis from elsewhere, whereas with the "wrong" result they would have to actually do it themselves.
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School isn't about learning, it's about baby sitting and imposing respect for authority and ability to do make work. If you're lucky you'll get an education as a side effect. For myself I went to some of the best public schools in the country and the education I got was generally only comparable to what I could have gotten from self-study with the exception of perhaps one or two excellent teachers.
It carries on through undergrad and into post-grad. Even the best funded labs still have mountains of crappy equipment that everyone has to use, and one researcher who keeps everything that works under lock and key.
On the plus side, it's a great way to learn to be really ingenious with limited resources. We figured out how to get accurate hysteresis loops for ferrous samples using a breadboard, an ancient laptop, a few clicks of Cu wire and a bucket of miscellaneous components. That was shortly after we flooded the lab testing Reynold's number for shear-resistant fluids with plumbing parts.