alt Hacker NewsThat's fair, but in this case it should be pretty easy to verify if the person is lying. The claim is highly reproducible and the instructor wouldn't even have to do it.
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ncruces • 04/02/2025
How? What happens when students start buying faulty hardware to justify unrelated delays?
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It's only "reproducible" if you find other 555's mixed in the shipment but not distributed to students. Depending on what the error rate in the shipment packing is, that might be very easy or it might be quite hard. At any rate, it's a stats problem that the professor is unlikely to want to engage with. Unfortunately.
For the next semester, a good prof would have a QA step or a harnass that turns on a green light if you plug in a working-as-expected package. I can see how the lab assistant job gets plenty to do in a well-run course, and also how unlikely it is to be happening in real life. There aren't enough incentives.