On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:54:56 -0400, Phil Hobbs
wrote:
On 9/20/2014 5:37 PM, wrote:
On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 14:23:20 -0700, Jim Thompson
wrote:
On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 14:18:59 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:
[snip]
If you know enough to fake the
lab data, you know enough.
Well, you also have to know enough to get the wrong answer, by the
right amount, particularly in chem labs.
Absolutely! At MIT we called it "dry lab" ;-)
Same at UIUC. I only did it for chem, though. Hopeless courses with
even less useful labs, intended only to waste *loads* of time and thin
the herd. Physics wasn't much different. It was only next to useless
(third semester was absurd).
Wow. No wonder you guys like simulation so much. 
Me? Like simulation? I only use it for things like series filters
and a few other things. I can't stand the models board level
designers are forced to use, so don't trust anything but "ideal"
components. At least I know what I'm simulating.
The lab courses I was in (three physics, one chemistry, and one
astronomy at UBC and one in physics at Stanford) were taught well, had
profs that hung around, TAs that knew your name and saw how you worked,
and (usually) a long-serving engineering technician who would answer
questions, keep the apparatus working, and take no BS whatsoever. (The
guy at UBC Physics was Wolf Breuer, a great man in his way, and the one
at Stanford was Eric Gustafson, who ran out of money as a grad student
and had to take the lab job, but later finished his Ph.D. and did some
good work elsewhere, iirc.)
The TAs in chemistry and physics weren't so bad but the classes, and
in particular, the labs were horrible. That's on the full prof
running the show, not on the poor droid carrying out the orders.
Slacking off in the lab would have attracted immediate and very
unfavourable notice in either place.
Who said anything about slacking off? The labs, particularly the chem
labs, just didn't work and, even with all of the time they wasted
(under penalty of the grade) weren't long enough to finish the project
it *anything* went wrong.
I hope and expect that you guys are mostly just bragging, but either
way, it's entirely misguided.
With chem and physics? Not a chance. The courses were really bad
(and got worse with each one. The third semester of physics was
optics AND quantum. The curve was bimodal with 40% between 90 and
100, and 40% 20 on the exams. Tell me that this makes a good
course. They even admitted that it was a flunk-out course and didn't
really expect anyone to learn anything about either subject.
The EE courses were the opposite - very good, with few exceptions (one
soon learned which profs to steer clear of). Math was pretty good,
too, and even got better as we went along (as the flunk-out quotas
were met). The only reason for chemistry and physics was to flunk
students out.