Comment by finnthehuman
Comment by finnthehuman 2 days ago
>The lesson is taught early and often. It often sort of baffles me when other people are baffled at how often this happens in science,
Math and some sciences have the aura of definitive right and wrong, so even though by college everyone knows the expression "give the answer the teacher wants to hear", they just think in those subjects the teacher has access to absolute answers.
The primary thing taught by our schooling system (and 2nd place isn't even close) is bureaucracy obedience. This has the obvious effects, but one of the subtler ones is deference to "science" as an authority requiring obedience rather than the process of figuring shit out.
I studied Engineering rather that physics. In our lab reports we were expected to include a discussion of the results and the experimental method. It was basically expected that the report should include associated commentary around potential sources of error and modifications to improve the experimental accuracy.
I don't recall ever being marked down for failing to obtain the "correct" result the impression I came away with was so long as you were thorough in your discussion and analysis the exact result was less important.
I can remember my second year thermodynamics class had a fairly complicated lab which involved taking measurements from inflow and outflow of various heat exchangers in a variety of configurations (Counter flow, Cross flow etc) then computing the efficiency of each configuration. I recall getting into minutiae in the report about assumed friction factors and suggested methods to asses the smoothness of the pvc pipes etc. to improve the accuracy of calculations etc.