Comment by yummyfajitas
14 years ago
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.
That's so funny because I always loved getting the answer wrong. I could get full credit for explaining possible sources of error, versus having to develop a well-established analysis independently. You'd think more students would think this way.
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.