Do You Fudge Your Lab Numbers?

[circulus vitios]

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I don't fudge lab numbers but I could see why people do. I get great results in my quantitative analysis class - typically 5-8 parts per thousand error. But, I get terrible results in my organic class. I usually get ~70% of the expected yield. Organic chemistry is purely qualitative at my school, but it still sucks getting such low yields. I have no idea why it happens. 😕

edit:

I'm not sure if this is considered fudging numbers, but I'll sometimes estimate volumes during titrations when we're using ******ed indicators that are impossible to use (e.g., chromate ion titration.) My professor explained the color change as a "grapefruit color" and not a "tomato juice color." The solution is yellow to begin with so judging a yellow to grape fruit change is hard.

Almost there, I think --> note the volume. Add a few more drops, I think this is grapefruit? --> note the volume. Add one more drop...SON OF A ***** STUPID PIECE OF **** STOPCOCK, I JUST ADDED 5 DROPS! --> make an estimate between current volume and the last volume.

 

[rem6775]

Some of you take yourselves way too seriously.

 

[kak9699]

Almost there, I think --> note the volume. Add a few more drops, I think this is grapefruit? --> note the volume. Add one more drop...SON OF A ***** STUPID PIECE OF **** STOPCOCK, I JUST ADDED 5 DROPS! --> make an estimate between current volume and the last volume.

That's the absolute worst feeling! Sounds like the time I managed to punch a hole through my filter and loose all my product back into the flask. FRICK!

 

[fizzgig]

... I get terrible results in my organic class. I usually get ~70% of the expected yield.

LOL. if you think 70% is bad you were not present for some of my finer moments in organic

 

[VikingLegacy]

baleeted

 

[hiyaman]

OP, I am highly offended that you would have the nerve to treat school as nothing but a means to an end in a culturally bankrupt decaying cesspool of a country. You're there to have your head stuffed with foreign ideas so that you can alienate your family and participate in the dismantling of the West, not to get ahead, graduate with a good GPA and get into medical school like the dozens of other people that just fudge their numbers! Remember, science isn't just one of many useful ways that humanity can acquire knowledge about the universe, it's something holy - sacred, untouchable. I reserve the right to be hugely self righteous towards you because you desecrated the Almighty Scientific Method, the Holy Scripture of modern civilization and its throngs of technologically addicted Dilbert-like slave proles.

In fact, for even thinking about something like modifying a recorded temperature by tenths of a degree in the process of completing a linearized paperwork-laden process that tries and utterly fails to capture the realities of actual research science, I vote we execute you immediately without a trial.

HEIL ACADEMIA!

I actually lol'd at this. I think its the principle of it all why people are offended. If he can fudge lab numbers which basically have minimal penalties in terms of points, what is going to stop him from doing something dishonest in a bigger project say a midterm? If you change your numbers to get higher points then the fact is you are doing something dishonest and wrong.

He's definitely not alone though, lab reports are extremely easy to change numbers/make up data if your labs don't require you to turn in lab notes after the experiment is finished. At my school this is a common policy in order to curb the fabrication of data.

 

[circulus vitios]

I actually lol'd at this. I think its the principle of it all why people are offended. If he can fudge lab numbers which basically have minimal penalties in terms of points, what is going to stop him from doing something dishonest in a bigger project say a midterm? If you change your numbers to get higher points then the fact is you are doing something dishonest and wrong.

He's definitely not alone though, lab reports are extremely easy to change numbers/make up data if your labs don't require you to turn in lab notes after the experiment is finished. At my school this is a common policy in order to curb the fabrication of data.

I can understand fudging numbers on a lab because labs are all about luck. Following the procedure doesn't mean a whole lot when you have to do stuff qualitatively. "Dry the solution with a drying agent." Uh, ok. How much do I use? It doesn't say. How do I know when it's dry? Well, the drying agent shouldn't clump together! Ok, so do I like dump the entire bottle in? 😕

Let me repeat the experiment a few times and the results might not be so bad. But it doesn't work like that. Each lab is usually completely different, using new techniques or procedures that will undoubtedly be screwed up due to inexperience.

 

[VikingLegacy]

baleeted

 

[IvyHopeful20]

By that logic, you can cheat on your calculus exam because you'll never need it again.

 

[VikingLegacy]

baleeted

 

[Polymer Based]

I actually lol'd at this. I think its the principle of it all why people are offended. If he can fudge lab numbers which basically have minimal penalties in terms of points, what is going to stop him from doing something dishonest in a bigger project say a midterm? If you change your numbers to get higher points then the fact is you are doing something dishonest and wrong.

He's definitely not alone though, lab reports are extremely easy to change numbers/make up data if your labs don't require you to turn in lab notes after the experiment is finished. At my school this is a common policy in order to curb the fabrication of data.

Fudging numbers in lab =\= cheating on exams.

 

[IvyHopeful20]

What's the difference?

 

[circulus vitios]

What's the difference?

Jaywalking and robbing a bank. What's the difference?

 

[IvyHopeful20]

Difference here is if you get caught doing it, the punishment is a zero on the lab or the exam and maybe IA. It's not the same for jaywalking and robbing a bank.

 

[Polymer Based]

Difference here is if you get caught doing it, the punishment is a zero on the lab or the exam and maybe IA. It's not the same for jaywalking and robbing a bank.

Here's your logic. I speed on the freeway (70mph on a 65mph), and therefore I am also willing to commit murder.

 

[hiyaman]

Well I guess I used a bad example but I still think lab numbers are really inconsequential, your TA isn't going to hand you a D only for the reason that your yield was low or that your MP was off by a 10 degrees. So why change them and do something dishonest when you can easily just write about reasons for different numbers? That's just my opinion.



Btw it's dry when the drying agent (MgSO4, i used this last week in my inorganic lab) is freely flowing. You should see some big clumps and when your solution is dry then there should be small particles of the drying agent floating around when you swirl it. 👍

 

[IvyHopeful20]

Here's your logic. I speed on the freeway (70mph on a 65mph), and therefore I am also willing to commit murder.

Only if the punishment for both was the same, which it isn't. That tells you how the crimes are viewed.

 

[fizzgig]

for what it's worth, at some schools jaywalking is speeding is murder. one academic dishonesty hit, for ANYTHING, and you're out. obviously not all are like this, but why even consider asking for it.

 

[MisterVeil]

Real life doesn't work in absolutes, so I don't buy into them. I also don't buy into the slippery slope type arguments that fudging a lab score will gradually degenerate into embezzlement, bank robberies and stealing all of the ketchup packets out of your local McDonald's.

Although I don't personally cheat, changing a 23 to a 25 on some undergraduate lab writeup doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, at least not to me. Trying to equate small offenses to larger offenses is silly and pointless.

Thank you for injecting some common sense into this thread.


IvyHopeful, I honestly don't understand how to respond to your reasoning. You don't understand that life and morality do not come in shades of black and white. Why is it so hard to believe that many people might see nothing wrong with fudging a number on a chem lab, and that those same people would consider it reprehensible to try and cheat on a quiz or exam?

 

[IvyHopeful20]

Thank you for injecting some common sense into this thread.


IvyHopeful, I honestly don't understand how to respond to your reasoning. You don't understand that life and morality do not come in shades of black and white. Why is it so hard to believe that many people might see nothing wrong with fudging a number on a chem lab, and that those same people would consider it reprehensible to try and cheat on a quiz or exam?

Um life and morality does. Cheating on a lab and cheating on an exam are a pretty identical. Schools, who decide punishments, certainly think so.

 

[wanderer]

IMO you can't compare lab measurements to tests because in a lab you can do the procedure as described and still get bad results. However, most grading schemes will take these into effect so that if you get bad results once in a while your overall grade won't be affected that much. If your school severely penalizes bad results, they're giving you disincentives to hand in honest work and they need to correct that.

I definitely think that changing numbers on a report is pretty bad. What if you're doing bench research and you get poor results? Will you continue lying? What about 5 years down the line when someone tries to repeat your experiments and they don't work, and they try to contact you? From my what I understand this is a possibility.

As a TA if I noticed it and determined it was done on purpose I would certainly report it as cheating.

 

[Grom]

Doesn't mean it's okay to fudge numbers in intro chem labs, but I suspect that plenty of people who fudge numbers for lab reports in intro chem courses would never fudge numbers in real research, because fudging numbers in real research means you are potentially giving inaccurate results to people who are actual using those results as a source of knowledge.

 

[VikingLegacy]

baleeted

 

[hiyaman]

I just think that this student is trying to be perfect, he doesn't like that he has a 45% error or whatever so he wants to change his results so he can have that 10% error. Where do you draw the line? No one is perfect and in research/lab you are not going to always get what you want.

Now some people say "oh changing a small number is no big deal", but that's not the issue. The issue is that this student is doing something inherently dishonest in schoolwork which should be discouraged always. This principle should be discouraged on this website which is geared towards students.

JMO

 

[ReptarBar]

^^^ can you honestly call yourself straight after posting that?

 

[Mithril]

Sometimes I steal wi-fi. You will one day see me robbing a bank and stealing meds. Where do I draw the line? Perhaps one day I will steal a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton and then the entire world.

 

[IvyHopeful20]

Not to get personal here, but from what I've read of you here you're the most prestige-driven person who still actively posts on this entire forum. For further reference on that, see your name. You don't care WHICH ivy you get into, just that you get into one. On that basis I find it suspect that you even give half a crap about cheating. It seems more like you just know that if YOU do it, YOU won't get into your fancy ivy school, therefore cheating is the Antichrist. If a Harvard press release declared that the school's official stance was that cheating was a form of social Darwinism and a fully valid method of competition, something tells me you'd be here on SDN telling us all how we're suckers for actually studying.

Don't ever let any authority figure - school, government or otherwise - try to tell you what's right or wrong.

Whoa there. I didn't realize that only the ivy schools frowned upon cheating......

 

[rhesuspieces]

Can we all just agree that unless your lab is extremely quantitatively driven, there is no reason to fudge lab results? The morals/academic legality of the situation are irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that in most schools, the actual percent yield is a tiny portion of your actual grade. Fudging numbers won't get you from a B to an A. So why bother? Just use your discussion section to explain where the error came from.

And really, in the whole spectrum of academic dishonesty, fudging numbers is puppy pee in the ocean. I for one know that my lab TA wouldn't even want to bother with the paperwork necessary to report that kind of "academic dishonesty".

 

[45408]

Not to freak you out but be very careful if you will fudge your numbers. In a gen chem lab a few years back we had a lab that involved purification etc. I ended up with a relatively low percent yield but stuck to my guns. Others, however, pushed the fudge factor to the max to get up into the 90+% yield. After grading our lab write ups the professor announced that our samples were intentionally compromised and that a perfect purification would've come up in the 70s%. You can imagine what grade the folks got that had little to no experimental error present in their conclusion.

I was going to mention this. A lot of lab experiments won't have a high yield, so your best plan is to report your results honestly.

 

[45408]

OP, I am highly offended that you would have the nerve to treat school as nothing but a means to an end in a culturally bankrupt decaying cesspool of a country. You're there to have your head stuffed with foreign ideas so that you can alienate your family and participate in the dismantling of the West, not to get ahead, graduate with a good GPA and get into medical school like the dozens of other people that just fudge their numbers! Remember, science isn't just one of many useful ways that humanity can acquire knowledge about the universe, it's something holy - sacred, untouchable. I reserve the right to be hugely self righteous towards you because you desecrated the Almighty Scientific Method, the Holy Scripture of modern civilization and its throngs of technologically addicted Dilbert-like slave proles.

In fact, for even thinking about something like modifying a recorded temperature by tenths of a degree in the process of completing a linearized paperwork-laden process that tries and utterly fails to capture the realities of actual research science, I vote we execute you immediately without a trial.

HEIL ACADEMIA!

This was pretty hilarious.