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.)

This 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.

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.

Same package. 555 is typically a DIP-8, transistor packages are available in the same. So you would have to examine the cryptic markings and compare them with the other students, and that’s only if you suspected some fuckup on the part of the knowledgeable people.

But that's the thing that both students and often the teachers forget. We don't run labs to go smoothly, we run labs because you'll have to troubleshoot. There is no learning experience in a lab that works without issues, in fact IMO if lab instructions are of the step by step type, they should always have some deliberate errors in it to get students to troubleshoot.

To play devil's advocate, just imagine the previous posters Story at a company, i.e. a junior engineer not being able to make some simple tasks work and telling their supervisor "it doesn't work" and it turns out after 8 weeks they grabbed some wrong part. Should they have expected their supervisor to check all the parts? Should they expect a good performance evaluation?

> Should they expect a good performance evaluation?

They should expect that particular incident to not affect their performance evaluation, since it was very much not their fault.

In your hypothetical scenario, your hypothetical junior engineer went to the senior engineer repeatedly for advice, and the senior engineer did not do their job properly:

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.

This is a huge failure in mentorship that wouldn't be ignored at a company that actually cares about these things.

> They should expect that particular incident to not affect their performance evaluation, since it was very much not their fault.

What do you mean not their fault? I've seen wrong parts delivered by suppliers, so yes responsibility of an engineer who puts together a circuit is definitely checking that the parts are correct.

> In your hypothetical scenario, your hypothetical junior engineer went to the senior engineer repeatedly for advice, and the senior engineer did not do their job properly:

>> 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.

Again _never_ the equipment's fault? It wasn't the equipment it was a part. So maybe it was an issue of miscommunication? I find it hard to believe that the lab tech said it could never be the parts, considering how those things are handled in student labs, small parts break all the time.

Maybe, it's true and it was a crappy lab tech, maybe they could not imagine the part being broken, but I've seen the other side of the equation as well, when things don't work students often just throw their hands up and say "it doesn't work" without any of their own troubleshooting expecting the tutor/lab tech/professor to do the troubleshooting for them (quite literally, can you check that we wired everything correctly...).

In my experience this does not get accepted in industry. I acknowledge though what the other poster said, generally in industry incentives are different and someone would have intervened if a project gets held up for 8 weeks by a single person.

Regarding the story, I wonder what would have been an acceptable solution (apart from the lab tech possibly being more helpful?), I as a teacher would have excepted a report which would have given a detailed account of the troubleshooting steps etc. (but it needs to show that a real effort to find the cause, simply saying the lab tech couldn't help is not sufficient). Simply saying "it wasn't my fault because I had a wrong part" shouldn't just give you an A.