Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

One of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science education, and education in general was in my high school physics class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopwatch when the ball hits the floor.

Anyone who has ever had a wristwatch of similar tech should know how hard it is to get anything like precision out of those things. It's a millimeter sized button with a millimeter depth of press and could easily need half a second of jabbing at it to get it to trigger. It's for measuring your mile times in minutes, not fractions of a second fall times.

Naturally, our data was total, utter crap. Any sensible analysis would have error bars that, if you treat the problem linearly, would have put 0 and negative numbers within our error bars. I dutifully crunched the numbers and determined that the gravitational constant was something like 6.8m/s^2 and turned it in.

Naturally, I got a failing grade, because that's not particularly close, and no matter how many times you are solemnly assured otherwise, you are never graded on whether you did your best and honestly report what you observe. From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got. You might hope that there comes some point in your career where that stops being the case, but as near as I can tell, it literally never does. Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works.

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, because it more-or-less always happens. Science proceeds despite this, not because of it.

(But jerf, my teacher... Yes, you had a wonderful teacher who didn't only give you an A for the equivalent but called you out in class for your honesty and I dunno, flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct" answer to three significant digits because that was impossible. There are a few shining lights in the field and I would never dream of denying that. Now tell me how that idealism worked for you going forward the next several years.)

On the other hand my experience as both a graduate and professor teaching students are equally discouraging.

1. Most students don't want to have to think. As a student I was always annoyed that we'd be given exact instructions with an exactly know result to reproduce, while this is generally not how real experiments work. So when I designed an experiment I wrote instructions that reflected more the real life experience, I.e. instead of "place the lens A 10mm from object B" it was "place the lens one focal length away from the object, to know the focal length of your lens you can use a light source at Infinity (far away)." after I left my university the instructions were reverted back because students complained that they didn't get step by step instructions.

2. Students dutifully write down a measurements that is of several orders of magnitude with absolutely no acknowledgement/discussion. I have seen speed of light barely faster than a car and mass of a small piece material in 100s of kg (usually because students forget a nano or giga in a calculation), without any discussion that the result is nonsensical.

3. Similar they make a fit like the one in the OP and don't even discuss the error bars. Or (and that's already the better students) they make a fit with tiny error bars, but get the wrong result (typically due to some mistake like above) and in the discussion say the difference to an expected error is due to measurement error.

Now I also know that there are crappy graduate students who teach because they are teaching the "only get the correct result" but it's often very difficult to improve teaching because students will immediately complain that they have to adjust to changes.