alt Hacker NewsMy physics professor told us once about a lab he had to do when he was a student himself, about measuring the adiabatic gas constant of air. The workload at that point was immense, so lots of students would just write a report and give the textbook answer—and be marked wrong.
It turned out the TA had sabotaged the experiment by putting alcohol in the bottom of the (dark glass) measurement bottle, so the measurement would be of the constant of “air with a fair amount of alcohol vapor in it”, which would give a different constant. And if you actually did the exercise, you'd get that “wrong” number, and that would be the only way to get the lab approved.
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In one class I took, we were examining a range of car engines for faults and the task was to get it running.
The rumour was that the previous years class had one engine where the ignition rotor arm wire had been replaced by section of coloured plastic which was covered in the usual grease and crap in the housing.
The instructor was looking for persistence and elimination of possibilities rather than actually solving it. But one team did. As long as you solved the others that was enough to complete the class.
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.
The trouble with these kinds of games is that they put the more diligent students at a disadvantage. For example, someone might compare their experimental result against the textbook constant, realise it's wrong, and spend much more time trying to identify their "mistake", not realising they've been sabotaged. This puts further pressure on their other work.
One cannot argue that this is fair on the basis that it's the "real world", because all that does is reward the sloppier (middle) approach. It filters the very lazy from the average, but at the expense of the excellent.
Even as I rather vigorously grumble at the status quo, let it be noted that I celebrate those iconoclasts fighting the good fight all the more for the fact that they are going against the status quo to do so. May their tenacity and creativity ultimately prevail.
That would be a very valuable lab, IF students hadn't been explicitly trained in opposite behaviour for a decade by then.
I lived a very similar experience:
My 4th year computer science professor in software engineering assigned us a four-phase programming assignment for the semester.
My teammate and I spent several sleepless days on the first assignment, and felt some of the requirements were contradictory. Finally we reached out to the professor, and he formally clarified the requirements. We asked him, "well OK, if requirements are unclear, what are we as students supposed to DO?!?" and he answered - exactly what you did; ask the user/client for clarification. "OK, but what if we hadn't, what if we just made assumptions and built on those??". And his eyes twinkled in a gentle smile.
My team mate and I had worked in the industry as summer students at this point, and felt this was the best most realistic course university has offered - not the least because after every phase, you had to switch code with a different team and complete next phase on somebody else's (shoddy, broken, undocumented) code. This course was EXACTLY what "real world" was like - but rest of the class was trained on "Assignment 1, question 1, subquestion A", and wrote a letter of complaint to the Dean.
I understood their perspective, but boy, were they in for a surprise when they joined the workforce :)