Anybody else get screwed over by lab?

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TheBiologist

TheBiologist

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It seems like every biology and chemistry class I have taken the lab has screwed me over.

I was near top of the class on final exams but lost the A in 2 of my classes this semester because I got a D and a C in my chem/bio labs

I am pretty salty about this.....this happen to anybody else? (btw my school combines lecture/lab grades so the D/C doesn't show up but it brought down my A to a B
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Are those C/D grades below median for lab, or are you about average in lab and they just use lab grades to curve the distribution down?
 
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efle said:
Are those C/D grades below median for lab, or are you about average in lab and they just use lab grades to curve the distribution down?
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90.9% of the class scored higher than me in lab, so below the median.....
 
When I clicked on this I was gonna say yes, I had to work way harder (hours spent) on my A in ochem lab vs lecture. A vs D is a pretty wide gap. Is any of it admittedly on you? if it isn't, talk to the prof, then his boss, etc. until resolved. If it is on you, work as hard as you have to to never let it happen again. good luck.
 
TheBiologist said:
It seems like every biology and chemistry class I have taken the lab has screwed me over.

I was near top of the class on final exams but lost the A in 2 of my classes this semester because I got a D and a C in my chem/bio labs

I am pretty salty about this.....this happen to anybody else? (btw my school combines lecture/lab grades so the D/C doesn't show up but it brought down my A to a B
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TheBiologist said:
90.9% of the class scored higher than me in lab, so below the median.....
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1. Find out why you're doing so poorly in labs

2. Fix it by using whatever resources you have (office hours, TAs etc.)
 
In undergrad, I made the first perfect score on the final exam in several years in one of my classes, but still made a B because of lab. There's more than exams to life, the sooner you understand that, the better.
 
EODguy said:
To clarify: my labs are separate 1 credit classes. Are yours all one 4 credit class?
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His lab grade pulled down his overall grade, so I'm assuming so. I had courses like that where the lab was a 0 credit course and the grade was part of the 4 credit lecture. Very weird.
 
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TheBiologist said:
yes one 4 credit class
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Always hated this and never understood the point. Bio lab was nothing more than memorization; chemistry involved some effort for me personally though.

Lab reports: They suck but follow the rubric closely and you're guaranteed an A.

Practicals: Memorize as much relevant material as necessary.

Quizzes: Pre read the lab for the day and/or review the last lab.


Following those behaviors should afford you an A, objectively. The other variables are your own to understand and adjust accordingly.


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I hated lab. I liked gen chem lab. Bio lab's suck. I would do poorly on the quizzes. The class average would be a 4/10 and one person would get a 10/10. My TA would say "If one person gets a 10/10, everyone else can."
 
At my school biology classes are all four credits with lab included but physics and chemistry have separate lab courses. My grades on lab work in biology are usually pretty close to my test grades. I have noticed that lab grades tend to be rather subjective in certain classes. Figure out the expectations of the person who is going to be grading your work and tailor it to that. Most of my friends who do poorly in biology labs either just didn't put enough effort in or they weren't writing their reports for the TA - they wanted to structure it the way they like it, or they decided to complain about lack of instructions in their intro.

For classes with separate sections I always wonder if having different grades in the lab than I do in the lecture is going to look weird.
 
I got absolutely boned by Orgo lab because of the written final. Lab itself was fine - I was getting above average grades on my labs and I had aced the practical exam. The professor had given us the final from the year before to study; it was all concepts about the labs we did, so that's what I studied for. The exam we were given was exactly the opposite - rote memorization of the reactions from the labs we did, which were mostly ridiculously complicated and super long reactions that you had no hope of knowing unless you had memorized the figures from the lab manual. I bombed that test, man I was pissed!
 
Turkishking said:
I hated lab. I liked gen chem lab. Bio lab's suck. I would do poorly on the quizzes. The class average would be a 4/10 and one person would get a 10/10. My TA would say "If one person gets a 10/10, everyone else can."
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I loved bio and chem lab, bio more than chem. Haven't taken orgo yet though. Physics was okay. Not super exciting, but easy.
 
nkw22 said:
I got absolutely boned by Orgo lab because of the written final. Lab itself was fine - I was getting above average grades on my labs and I had aced the practical exam. The professor had given us the final from the year before to study; it was all concepts about the labs we did, so that's what I studied for. The exam we were given was exactly the opposite - rote memorization of the reactions from the labs we did, which were mostly ridiculously complicated and super long reactions that you had no hope of knowing unless you had memorized the figures from the lab manual. I bombed that test, man I was pissed!
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That is an exam from the bowels of Hell my friend. I cringed during that entire read.


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When I instructed lab courses this is what I found the students had problems with:

1) Would not finish pre-lab work
2) Scored poorly on opening/ending quiz (mostly because they didn't do pre-lab)
3) Precision is a bitch
4) Did not compile their reports according to the clear rules I gave them
5) Did not follow other various deadlines

Most of all, did not come to me for help until they were already in deep.

If you want to...you can PM me and talk a bit more about your problem. I might be able to direct you in what direction works best. Your situation is not uncommon in my experience.
 
Lost In Transcription said:
When I instructed lab courses this is what I found the students had problems with:

1) Would not finish pre-lab work
2) Scored poorly on opening/ending quiz (mostly because they didn't do pre-lab)
3) Precision is a bitch
4) Did not compile their reports according to the clear rules I gave them
5) Did not follow other various deadlines

Most of all, did not come to me for help until they were already in deep.

If you want to...you can PM me and talk a bit more about your problem. I might be able to direct you in what direction works best. Your situation is not uncommon in my experience.
Click to expand...
I currently teach undergrad labs and 100% agree with this. Not following instructions and not asking questions is how my students screw their grade over 9 out of 10 times.

@TheBiologist it does sound like the problem ball is in your court from what you've said here, but you can also PM me if you want to analyze it and get some additional advice on how to improve.
 
Lost In Transcription said:
When I instructed lab courses this is what I found the students had problems with:

1) Would not finish pre-lab work
2) Scored poorly on opening/ending quiz (mostly because they didn't do pre-lab)
3) Precision is a bitch
4) Did not compile their reports according to the clear rules I gave them
5) Did not follow other various deadlines

Most of all, did not come to me for help until they were already in deep.

If you want to...you can PM me and talk a bit more about your problem. I might be able to direct you in what direction works best. Your situation is not uncommon in my experience.
Click to expand...

Not gonna lie, I totally winged it in gen chem lab. Like barely measured anything. By the grace of God, everything always worked the way it was supposed to.
 
nkw22 said:
I got absolutely boned by Orgo lab because of the written final. Lab itself was fine - I was getting above average grades on my labs and I had aced the practical exam. The professor had given us the final from the year before to study; it was all concepts about the labs we did, so that's what I studied for. The exam we were given was exactly the opposite - rote memorization of the reactions from the labs we did, which were mostly ridiculously complicated and super long reactions that you had no hope of knowing unless you had memorized the figures from the lab manual. I bombed that test, man I was pissed!
Click to expand...
This is exactly what happened to me. I went into the final exam with a comfortable A and got the lowest possible B in the course because of the final, which I was really thankful for because I legitimately failed it. I had no idea what was going on lol because none of that knowledge was necessary to get the labs done correctly during the semester. I always just followed directions and went on my way.
 
In my experience, many students who are perfectly capable of explaining a concept in the classroom or expounding on theory have trouble with coming into the laboratory and actually applying those concepts to perform experiments. I can't count with my fingers how many times students have accidentally wasted entire lab periods because they never thought to think which phase their desired compound is in and threw away the filtrate instead of the precipitate or because they carried out useless experiments that were not informative at all.

I think it's a real problem because book learning can only take you so far - science is mainly experimentation and not so much learning from a book because scientific questions are those that haven't already been answered. I think graduate school emphasizes this by only having 1-2 years of classes (and even then, mainly part-time) and the rest of the 3-4 years is research.
 
Only Bs I have are in two labs. Combination of:

1) lab classes are very small compared to lecture but...
2) the curve is sometimes harsher (15% As means like 1-2 ppl get As)
And
3) I don't give a **** about lab classes, they are a waste of everyone's time and money
 
kraskadva said:
Personally, I'll settle for good grammar and a coherent explanation of what went wrong. Alas, the majority of my students tend to be proficient in neither English nor experimental logic.
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Or even a reasonable hypothesis for what went wrong. So many people don't understand that "experimenter error" is not a reasonable explanation.
 
aldol16 said:
In my experience, many students who are perfectly capable of explaining a concept in the classroom or expounding on theory have trouble with coming into the laboratory and actually applying those concepts to perform experiments.
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+
Lucca said:
3) I don't give a **** about lab classes, they are a waste of everyone's time and money
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=
Most of the bad lab grades I've seen.

Some of the students just don't get it, some just don't care enough to.
 
Lucca said:
3) I don't give a **** about lab classes, they are a waste of everyone's time and money
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So are clinicals. I think we should just have everybody do the 1-2 pre-clinical years and then set them loose to practice on people.

Lucca said:
2) the curve is sometimes harsher (15% As means like 1-2 ppl get As)
Click to expand...

If both your lecture and lab courses allow 15% As, the smaller class size in labs doesn't make it a harsher curve. It makes it the same curve. The only way it would be harsher is if all the smart people decided to take one lab section and you happened to be in that section. But since there's nothing to suggest that happens, it would be more reasonable to assume a similar distribution of talent across the lab sections as you see in the larger lecture section. So let's say in your lecture, there are 200 people and 30 people can get As. Let's say that those are the people who are talented and deserve As anyway. Now let's say there are 10 lab section, each with 20 people in them. So in each lab section, only 3 people can get As. Yes, that's a lower absolute number, but one would assume that those 30 people from the lecture were approximately equally distributed through the lab sections. Thus, only 3 people from the lab section deserve As anyway.
 
aldol16 said:
So are clinicals. I think we should just have everybody do the 1-2 pre-clinical years and then set them loose to practice on people.



If both your lecture and lab courses allow 15% As, the smaller class size in labs doesn't make it a harsher curve. It makes it the same curve. The only way it would be harsher is if all the smart people decided to take one lab section and you happened to be in that section. But since there's nothing to suggest that happens, it would be more reasonable to assume a similar distribution of talent across the lab sections as you see in the larger lecture section. So let's say in your lecture, there are 200 people and 30 people can get As. Let's say that those are the people who are talented and deserve As anyway. Now let's say there are 10 lab section, each with 20 people in them. So in each lab section, only 3 people can get As. Yes, that's a lower absolute number, but one would assume that those 30 people from the lecture were approximately equally distributed through the lab sections. Thus, only 3 people from the lab section deserve As anyway.
Click to expand...

Yah what you say makes sense but what actually ends up happening is that everyone in the lab does just about the same besides a few people who try super hard on the lab reports and write as much info as physically possible to not miss any points and then people who don't try at all. In the middle everyone scores about the same so differentiating tiers becomes a question of a couple of points here and there. This is what I mean by a harsher curve. The smaller a class gets and the more rubric-dependent a grading system is, the harsher the curve.

Also I think clinical rotations are more useful than lab courses. Lab courses are nothing like working in an actual lab. In clijicals, even if you don't learn **** (and I'm sure most would say that they do), at least you get to see real patients
 
Lucca said:
Yah what you say makes sense but what actually ends up happening is that everyone in the lab does just about the same besides a few people who try super hard on the lab reports and write as much info as physically possible to not miss any points and then people who don't try at all. In the middle everyone scores about the same so differentiating tiers becomes a question of a couple of points here and there. This is what I mean by a harsher curve. The smaller a class gets and the more rubric-dependent a grading system is, the harsher the curve.

Also I think clinical rotations are more useful than lab courses. Lab courses are nothing like working in an actual lab. In clijicals, even if you don't learn **** (and I'm sure most would say that they do), at least you get to see real patients
Click to expand...

You would be surprised at how different lab reports can be. It will of course vary by school and how the lab is structured, but I don't give extra points for long lab reports that take the shotgun approach to answering questions. In fact, I don't like those too much because they are a waste of my time and I end up grading harshly because of that predisposition. The best answer is one that is concise and to the point - no extra work necessary. Lab reports I grade usually have similar grade distributions as homework assignments and exams. That is, it's on a normal curve and while the majority of people fall within 1 standard deviation from the mean, that's how a curve works.

Lab courses give you the skills to work in a lab. You're not working in a chemistry lab if you can't do a simple filtration, distillation, or extraction. Moreover, it teaches you how to think like an experimentalist. Things in lab never work the way they do in a book. You have to think about what went wrong and fix it. It's the same whether you're doing a simple organic workup or fixing an expensive HPLC.
 
aldol16 said:
You would be surprised at how different lab reports can be. It will of course vary by school and how the lab is structured, but I don't give extra points for long lab reports that take the shotgun approach to answering questions. In fact, I don't like those too much because they are a waste of my time and I end up grading harshly because of that predisposition. The best answer is one that is concise and to the point - no extra work necessary. Lab reports I grade usually have similar grade distributions as homework assignments and exams. That is, it's on a normal curve and while the majority of people fall within 1 standard deviation from the mean, that's how a curve works.

Lab courses give you the skills to work in a lab. You're not working in a chemistry lab if you can't do a simple filtration, distillation, or extraction. Moreover, it teaches you how to think like an experimentalist. Things in lab never work the way they do in a book. You have to think about what went wrong and fix it. It's the same whether you're doing a simple organic workup or fixing an expensive HPLC.
Click to expand...

True, but there are better ways to teach those skills than a cookbook lab course. For example, I took a course as credit for my intro Chem lab where we were told what tools we had for a particular lab assignment and had to think up of a question to answer using those tools. Nothing groundbreaking that was going to be published in nature, but, just to give one example off of the top of my head: "Does applying a small dose of caffeine to an ecoli culture increase their growth rate? Does it change rate of respiration in their container?" Way more fun, teaches the same skills as you can't do the experiment without figuring it out, but you figure it out yourself as opposed to watching a drowsy PhD student do it at 8am when he should be prepping for qualifying exams or something.

Edit: we were given a small budget to do this and were restricted to materials available through the university store room, so chemicals and tubes and plates and stuff
 
kraskadva said:
Personally, I'll settle for good grammar and a coherent explanation of what went wrong. Alas, the majority of my students tend to be proficient in neither English nor experimental logic.
Click to expand...

aldol16 said:
Or even a reasonable hypothesis for what went wrong. So many people don't understand that "experimenter error" is not a reasonable explanation.
Click to expand...


These. I just want my students to think like good scientists
 
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Lucca said:
True, but there are better ways to teach those skills than a cookbook lab course. For example, I took a course as credit for my intro Chem lab where we were told what tools we had for a particular lab assignment and had to think up of a question to answer using those tools. Nothing groundbreaking that was going to be published in nature, but, just to give one example off of the top of my head: "Does applying a small dose of caffeine to an ecoli culture increase their growth rate? Does it change rate of respiration in their container?" Way more fun, teaches the same skills as you can't do the experiment without figuring it out, but you figure it out yourself as opposed to watching a drowsy PhD student do it at 8am when he should be prepping for qualifying exams or something.

Edit: we were given a small budget to do this and were restricted to materials available through the university store room, so chemicals and tubes and plates and stuff
Click to expand...
For every one student who tells me they want something more like this, I have 25 who will whine that I didn't hold their hand enough through the basic 'cookbook' labs.
I'll give you two guesses as to which students we design the lab courses for and which we invite into the research labs.
 
Lucca said:
True, but there are better ways to teach those skills than a cookbook lab course. For example, I took a course as credit for my intro Chem lab where we were told what tools we had for a particular lab assignment and had to think up of a question to answer using those tools. Nothing groundbreaking that was going to be published in nature, but, just to give one example off of the top of my head: "Does applying a small dose of caffeine to an ecoli culture increase their growth rate? Does it change rate of respiration in their container?" Way more fun, teaches the same skills as you can't do the experiment without figuring it out, but you figure it out yourself as opposed to watching a drowsy PhD student do it at 8am when he should be prepping for qualifying exams or something.
Click to expand...

Well, then the problem isn't lab itself but rather labs in which step-by-step protocols are handed to the students. This requires no original thought and actually no thought whatsoever, as students are reduced to robots. However, many courses have moved away from that and might give students a question to answer (e.g. what is the empirical formula of this mineral?) and, after a reading assignment, the students then design an experiment or experiments to figure it out.

Fun fact: Although many graduate students like to style themselves as "PhD students," it's actually technically not correct to refer to graduate students as "PhD students" or "PhD candidates" until after their general exams because that's when they actually commence on the PhD phase of their training.
 
Lucca said:
3) I don't give a **** about lab classes, they are a waste of everyone's time and money
Click to expand...

A little belated, but I should clarify why I feel the way I do about your post. It's related quite a bit to several recent threads about why graduate students and even faculty may not like pre-meds. Here's the reason. Grad students put in a lot of time to prep for labs. It may not look like we do, but we have to read all the stuff you do and perform the same experiments. We read through the experiments, notice some potential pitfalls, and give you tips/helpful hints so that you don't mess up and spend an inordinate amount of time in lab. We don't like seeing you fail at your experiments because that means we have to stay longer with you and we, like you, would rather be elsewhere doing our research. But we do put in a lot of effort - not to mention into grading as well.

So when pre-meds walk through the door and don't give a **** about the experiments they're doing, it's like spitting in our face. We're not the ones who made you do the labs. You chose that path yourself. We're stuck there, same as you, and we've spent a lot of time trying to help the class out. If our students perform well, it's a positive reflection on us. To have a student not only not care about the lab but to disrespect us is quite offensive.
 
aldol16 said:
Fun fact: Although many graduate students like to style themselves as "PhD students," it's actually technically not correct to refer to graduate students as "PhD students" or "PhD candidates" until after their general exams because that's when they actually commence on the PhD phase of their training.
Click to expand...

Eh, "Candidate" wise you're correct, but during the first two years it is very correct to call students "PhD students" or also "doctoral students".
 
aldol16 said:
A little belated, but I should clarify why I feel the way I do about your post. It's related quite a bit to several recent threads about why graduate students and even faculty may not like pre-meds. Here's the reason. Grad students put in a lot of time to prep for labs. It may not look like we do, but we have to read all the stuff you do and perform the same experiments. We read through the experiments, notice some potential pitfalls, and give you tips/helpful hints so that you don't mess up and spend an inordinate amount of time in lab. We don't like seeing you fail at your experiments because that means we have to stay longer with you and we, like you, would rather be elsewhere doing our research. But we do put in a lot of effort - not to mention into grading as well.

So when pre-meds walk through the door and don't give a **** about the experiments they're doing, it's like spitting in our face. We're not the ones who made you do the labs. You chose that path yourself. We're stuck there, same as you, and we've spent a lot of time trying to help the class out. If our students perform well, it's a positive reflection on us. To have a student not only not care about the lab but to disrespect us is quite offensive.
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I can understand that perspective. I usually get along with the TAs just fine and it's not like I'm going around throwing the pipettes on the ground and not cleaning after myself, it's just not that big a deal to me if I get a B and not an A.
 
JustAPhD said:
Eh, "Candidate" wise you're correct, but during the first two years it is very correct to call students "PhD students" or also "doctoral students".
Click to expand...

Must be different between departments. Where I got my PhD (although I still speak of myself as a graduate student by habit and because I'm kind of in a limbo area now), nobody really uses "PhD student." You're either a provisional PhD candidate or a PhD candidate. It's a real rite of passage to pass your general exams because the program actually does flunk out students (unlike many programs nowadays where nobody or almost nobody is flunked out). So you have to earn your "PhD candidate" title.
 
aldol16 said:
Must be different between departments. Where I got my PhD (although I still speak of myself as a graduate student by habit and because I'm kind of in a limbo area now), nobody really uses "PhD student." You're either a provisional PhD candidate or a PhD candidate. It's a real rite of passage to pass your general exams because the program actually does flunk out students (unlike many programs nowadays where nobody or almost nobody is flunked out). So you have to earn your "PhD candidate" title.
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Yeah I think it's probably department dependent. Again I agree with the translation to candidate being based on passing your Candidacy exam, but what do you call pre-candidates then?
 
JustAPhD said:
Yeah I think it's probably department dependent. Again I agree with the translation to candidate being based on passing your Candidacy exam, but what do you call pre-candidates then?
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They're generally "graduate students" or just "students" but not "PhD students." That's unofficially what we call them. Around here, "PhD students" is rare and usually is used to mean the same thing as "PhD candidate," which is why we don't call first- and second-years that. Usually, everybody just uses the "first year grad student," "second year grad student," etc. designation.
 
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