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> Students are given incredibly precise instructions and told to find a certain result. If they fail to find the result, they are made to redo the “experiment”.
by black6 7y ago
> Students are given incredibly precise instructions and told to find a certain result. If they fail to find the result, they are made to redo the “experiment”.
In my final Chemical Engineering Unit Operations lab course there was a distillation column with the associated instrumentation suffering from neglect and abuse, as indicated by the saw-tooth molar ratio across the height instead of the smooth curve one would expect. My teammates for this lab insisted that we just fake up good-looking data for the distillation column to put in our report because that's what the other teams were doing. I put my foot down and told the team that we would use the data that was recorded, and draw conclusions in the lab report about the poorly-maintained equipment, and maybe something would be done about it before the next semester.
Well sonuvabitch... We received the only passing grade on that particular unit op lab, and the department chair allocated money to refit the lab equipment.
When learning, it's not about the result as much as it is getting the process right, something from which the standardized curriculum and test culture has steered education away.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoMy introduction to chemistry professor lied to us about a compound we were testing in order to see who would lie about their results and who would be honest even though they thought they were going to be graded poorly. Pretty sure both the alleged compound and actual compound were mostly harmless so there was little danger in his deception and the lesson was learned by the class to not falsify experiment data.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoI refused to "do a Hubble" and recorded the results I got and got marked down for poor experimental accuracy. Aside, I hate the practice of calling demonstrations "experiments".