alt Hacker NewsThis is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college.
The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless of your grade.
The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a transistor in a DIP-8 package, which was provided to us. If you blew it up, you got a slap on the wrist. That DIP-8 was otherwise yours for the class.
I could _never_ get anything resembling linear output out of my transistor. The lab tech was unhelpful, insisting that it must be something with how I had it wired, encouraging me to re-draw my schematic, check my wires, and so on. It could _never_ be the equipment's fault.
Eight (!) weeks into that ten week class, I found the problem: the DIP was not, in fact, just a transistor. It was a 555 timer that had somehow been mixed in with the transistors.
I went and showed the lab technician. He gave me another one. At this point, I had two weeks to complete eight weeks of lab work, which was borderline impossible. So I made an appointment to see the professor, and his suggestion to me was to drop the class and take it again. Which, of course, would've affected my graduation date.
I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened.
Replies
I only took two electronics classes, but in the later one I was the class hero for just buying a bunch of potentiometers on amazon so that we didn't have to waste all of that expensive time sitting around waiting for our turn with the only good one left. It cost me like $10
I was in honors freshman chemistry at university. Tough class, all homework (lots of it) graded rigorously, but only the midterm and final counted toward the course grade. So if you wanted an A you had to get an A on both exams.
After midterm, during every other lecture at least, the professor would sound a refrain: “An orbital is not a house! An electron does not live in a house!”
Final exam had a small number of complex problems to work out with pen and paper, tough stuff, lots of calculus. But the last question ended with “where does the electron live?”
That final problem, if you ignored the end wording, was super easy, something almost trivial to do with Helium iirc. The class had about 25 students in it; about 5 of us independently had the same thought: “this is a trick question, ‘the orbital is not a house in which the electron lives!’” And, independently, that’s how we five answered.
And we got marked wrong, all our course grades dropped to B+/- because of that one damn question.
Over a lunch or whatever, we discovered our shared experience and approached the professor as a group. He listened patiently and said: “Ah, right, I did insist on that idea, it’s understandable why you would think it’s a trick question and answer that way. But I still consider your answers wrong, grades stay as they are.” Some in the group even went to the dean and, to my understanding, he said it’s best to consider it a life lesson and move on.
>I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened.
This sentence could have also ended "my gpa dipped below the threshold for some bullshit mark it up to mark it down exercise masquerading as a scholarship and I had to re-take the class for a better grade anyway"
What I don't understand is why it took you 8 weeks to distinguish a timer from a transistor. That doesn't make your professor's reaction alright, I just find it puzzling.
It's funny, because while that's a terrible educational experience, you actually learned some important lessons despite them.
I remember the first time I found out that the software documentation I had been relying upon was simply and utterly wrong. It was so freeing to start looking at how things actually behaved instead of believing the utterly false documentation because the world finally made sense again.
this happens in "real life" as well
i spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why my 74LS20 wasn't being a dual 4-input NAND gate
turns out that was a date code, and it was some other chip entirely
1974 was a terrible year for 74xx series TTL chips
yes, i am old :-)
This is crazy to me because when I've run labs in the past, there were equipment failures literally all of the time. When you teach lots of people, shit breaks. Quite often if something didn't work, I'd just have one student swap equipment with another student to help diagnose this sort of thing.
Major bummer that others have had differing experiences from me, here.
I had a very similar experience during a lab internship I took during my biochemistry undergrad degree.
First part of a project was running PCR on a particular plasmid that we were going to use to transfer a gene into Drosophila. But for some reason the PCR didn't work, and I spent almost all of my time trying to get the damn thing to run.
Everyone naturally assumed I was just doing something wrong, being an undergrad with little lab experience. After about ten weeks, it turned out that the lab tech had written up the protocol wrong and I was using the wrong primers. No wonder it didn't work.
Was one of the experiences that made me realise that working in a lab really wasn't for me...
I ran labs in my university in Europe, in the early 2000s, and I'd like to think this would not have happened. We were selected as tutors due to our proficiency and dedication to the subject. Maybe it was a fluke, I've heard similar stories recently about local Unis.
Honestly, you got more real-world electronics training out of that experience than you paid for. You are now qualified to deal with remarked or counterfeit Chinese parts and other inevitable supply hazards in the business. Be grateful!
That's a tragic story. However, I'm surprised that the transistor was supposed to come in a DIP package. Usually through-hole discrete transistors come in a three-lead package like TO-92. Of course, that would not have helped you since yours looked like every other student's except the for the markings.
> So I made an appointment to see the professor, and his suggestion to me was to drop the class and take it again. Which, of course, would've affected my graduation date.
I would have been tempted to ask him to write me a check for the extra semester of tuition, but I'm sure that wouldn't have made the situation any better (and maybe would have made him more likely to grade strictly).
This makes me incredibly grateful for my physics lecturers, all of whom would bend over backwards to assist their students' journeys towards learning any time any stumbled or showed a spark of curiosity that needed fanning into a raging fire.
I had lecturers give me bonus marks above 100% because I noticed issues like this and thanked me for helping to improve the course material!
These lecturers, when merely overhearing a curious "huh?" conversation between students would spend hours of their own time scouring the library for relevant information and just "leave" photocopies for students to find the next day.
you should have gotten an A for being a real engineer
That's awful, and unfortunately relatable. Most of my university courses were pretty good, but I had a computer graphics course where I got about 80% for my project, and about 30% for my final grade, which meant I apparently got 0% for my exam. I was a graphics nerd, I'd written a raytracer in C++, made a decent start on a game engine in Java (including software rasterizer with perspective-correct texturing, transparency, and model saving and loading with keyframe animated forward kinematics), along with numerous games and rendering programs. This graphics course was trivial stuff and barely got past explaining what a bitmap was and how to draw pictures using API calls. I couldn't have legitimately scored zero in the exam.
After weeks of trying to make an appointment with the lecturer to discuss it (and being told "you failed, get over it"). I got an email from the lecturer, admitting that they'd forgotten to add my exam score to my overall score. And from this point, it took months further to get my official grade corrected.
This same lecturer also once emailed out grades by opening their whole-course grading spreadsheet, deleting all the rows except for that student's grade, and then saving it as a new file.
With 'track changes' turned on.
That is enraging. I've seen similar things happen too and it blows my mind how ridiculous some of these teachers can be. I don't know if it's dehumanization of their students in their minds or an utter unwillingness to devote 30 seconds of directed attention to understanding the situation and making a reasonable judgment, but whatever the cause it is prolific. The only thing worse is when one of them will add something like, "life isn't fair, get over it" when it's fully in their power to make a reasonable determination.