Comment by mikepurvis

Comment by mikepurvis 2 days ago

As bad as the prior story is, I don't know if intentionally misleading the students is the right way either— what if one had realized the contamination and acting in good faith had cleaned out the bottle? What if they did this afterward and ended up redoing the experiment only to be told they had cheated?

I'm all for exposing students to something unknown, but telling them they're doing X when it's really Y for anything longer than a single lecture ain't it.

jerf 2 days ago

You can square that circle by announcing at the beginning of the course that there is going to be some assignment like that, but I'm not telling you which, because the real world doesn't.

I do agree this is a good point; trust is not something that should be simply squandered. Nevertheless, this is still a lesson that needs to be taught and so often students make it to the end without a single teacher that did.

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foldr 2 days ago

This is ambitious. I once had a college class where the students were very upset because I decided to change the number of in-class quizzes from 5 to 4 a few weeks into the course. (The quizzes made up 10% of the overall grade.) Students hate it when you do anything even remotely weird or unexpected with assessments. Telling them that there is going to be a mystery trick assessment will just make them anxious and grumpy.

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- mikepurvis 2 days ago
  
  Right but doing it without saying anything is much worse.
  
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Sesse__ 2 days ago

Given that a report is supposed to tell what you did and then your calculations and conclusions, you'd better include something as dramatic as “we washed the equipment after getting the wrong results and detecting contamination”…

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Dylan16807 2 days ago

If you detect it and think it's relevant, that might be worth a note. But "reset and start over" is something that could reasonably be thought of as outside the scope of the report. You're reporting on the experiment, not logging your entire time in the lab.

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