In both segments of college Chemistry here our labs have been pathetic. We are rushed through the labs, encouraged to make faulty observations, and told as I was by my Chemistry professor" "It doesnt have to be perfect"

It doesnt have to be perfect? In my mind of course it must be perfect, my conclusion is that undergraduate chemistry thus far is a poor excuse for a scientific learning because the real scientific method is completely ignored, data is fudged and therefore both the criteria for grading and the hopes of collecting any accurate results are completely discarded.

So finally, at the end of the lab, after doing only two trials which were rushed and very useless I was forced to become yet a little more disillusioned with the scientific establishment.

Not to say the credentials arent there, my chem 1 teacher had a phd in biochemistry, my current teacher has a masters in chemistry, but the labs contain more idiocy, both in written material and application, then I could possibly describe in a few such paragraphs.

What also completely ticked me off was that we were told to actually ignore what we were observing in order to make the experiment come out right instead of trying to understand why it did not come out right.

I would rather have an experiment be a complete failure and begin to understand why it failed, rather than complete an experiment just because it is on the 'agenda' to do so and ignore blazingly obvious discrepencies

Does anyone understand what Im talking about? If anyone wants to know the actual details of the experiment I would be glad to elaborate...


RANT OVER

In schools it's often about learning the basic methods rather than discovering what the results are. I agree that ignoring faulty results are not a really nice way to learn things, but most likely trying to find the answers not relevant to the 'thing you need to study to pass' would mean another month of research resulting in answers that are not neccesarely to know for your exams, causing confusion among students who are less talented, and shortens timespan in which the rest of the study stuff needs to be teached, causing alot more people who wont pass the exam because they do need that extra month for learning the even more harder things that are yet to come.

Or something like that.

1800th post \o/

I am not sure to have understood what you are talking about but I made an example

At school I have been taught the Mendel's laws
If you cross green and yellow peas than you get 3\4 green peas and 1\4 yellow peas, or something like that

Well , I thougt that this proportion was perfect
75 green peas and 25 yellow peas , no question
I also thought mr Mendel was nothing else than a nice guy with a lot of time at disposal

Well I was astonished to learn some years later that the situation is quite different
If you cross green and yellow peas you can actually get a variety of different colors since many factor can affect the color of the peas

Mr Mendel was so smart to discard all the non essential factors and grasp the essence of the genetic trasmission

In other words Mr Mendel was a great scientist and not just an amateur because the results of his experiments were not....perfect.

Mendel documented all of his observations accurately. As a matter of fact Mendel was one of the purest scientists ever because he didnt have opinions which interfered with actual observed data. Im talking about forcing false data in order to complete an experiment.

In other words we were to report observations based upon what the procedure expected rather than what we observed, If thats your idea of science then your a bogus scientist.

If your trying to teach basic methods then use basic experiments, dont introduc e experiemnts which have too many variables. Too many unknowns make certain results impossible.

I dont see why you should offend people
It s evident that falsification , generally speaking, is not acceptable
It is of no use to ask this kind of question, then
but you said



If your professor literally mean what you have quoted , he is wrong of course
However I wonder whether he meant something like

" Hey guys do not expect to reproduce in labt exactly what you have learnt in theory , you must adjust a little bit your experiment "

If so, yes it makes some sense

This is an issue that is dear to my heart due to my Physics MMOG and it's attempt to fix science in the US and the World.

There are many issues here. The first one is understanding the difference between learning a method and using it. In this case, you are being exposed to the scientific method. But let's take an accounting of your environment: at the Uni level, it's likely a three hour class once a week. In this time, they have to not only teach chemistry but also that uses scientific method in chemistry. And such perfect results are very very rare. After all you are students in this and failure is a part of learning. But let's take this further assume that you actually want a career in chemistry. Further classes will emphasize results that are both accurate and precise. The idea is that since you're making your career in science, this is important. Note that not everybody who takes chemistry will actually have a career in science and thus we have to play to the masses.

It's a good science? Now technically it's not. It's a good teaching? Well, if chemistry is anything like physics, then no.

In my opinion the problem with several of the science labs as they try to do too much and too little time. Of course as a student, you'd have a FIT if the Professor told you that in order to get accurate results you have to spend 6, 8 or 10 hours actually performing the experiments!

So as a teacher, you have to balance out the needs of the class versus the needs of science. You have to get as much information across your students as possible within the constraints of the classroom, curriculum, and your audience.and a student, you have to glean as much information both from your successes and your failures.

The other major issue is the state of science in the US. Perhaps very likely due to the education that we are talking about, people have a very skewed understanding of what science is... heck we see this in this forum all the time! I've always felt that university labs should focus less on length results and more on proper scientific method. To your point, the experiment should be downsized so that you can get a perfect result every time by following the scientific method and an in-perfect result by not following the scientific method. The message that we send students today with experiences like you have mentioned is that whether you follow the scientific method or not, your results were flawed. Thus it's no surprise that there is a lack of trust in science and a lack of understanding of how it works and what it says. Of course, no experiment is infallible. While the chances for a simple chemical reaction are almost 100%, there are still many environmental factors and just plain human errors that will take away from the perfect results expected. These errors should be addressed it should be as important a part of the experiment of discussion as the scientific method and the procedure... Unfortunately it's not.

Exactly what I wanted to say, only you said it much better

I have no issue with science, I love science, its just that in order to get the grade you have to do a lot of things which not only seem fruitless, but also downright dishonest.

If they expect us to compete with the rest of the world they need to change the university system so that science and math become more interesting to the students, as it is now not too many people are interested in science because they can barely survive the classes.How is anyone going to be interested in a subject when they can barely grasp it? Not me, I always have done well, but even after getting an A in chemistry I, I still feel like I have only scratched the surface of it. If it was up to me I would simply go back and take the class over again but the financial aid system is not set up to handle that.

Right, they do indeed need much more time, you are absolutely correct, Im glad someone agrees with me. I would be willing to spend the time. I spend 10-20 hours a week doing calculations for that class, I would think it was wonderful to spend 8 hours in the lab. But because of their money/insurance concerns we are not allowed to be in the labs alone to conduct experiments without being babysat so as a result good lab experience at this level is a joke.

I think it would actually be much more interesting to find out why things dont work rather than why they do. The interesting thing to me in studying science is to find out how to solve problems, if the labs are choreographed so that an illusion of "there is no problem here" is portrayed then that is not science, its just business.

I dont blame the teachers, because most of them are trying their best to make a living and survive, but I have had the priviledge of working with some professors and math teachers who were not afraid to admit that something didnt look right according to the written lab, or the university program, and then proceed to solve that problem using the scientific method. To me that is truly an intelligent individual.

exactly. Even for non-science majors what is the purpose of science classes? To give them good, real-world problem-solving skills so that they can go into their respective fields applying a highly analytical approach to real-world problems. The only thing these labs I have been doing teach is how to do what the lab says regardless if the lab manual is wrong.

This is in a nutshell what I'm banking on with my game. If I can make Physics more interesting by wrapping it up in a MMORPG... if I can get across the simple lesson of the Scientific Method and how we apply it to Physics... if I can do this, then I might be able to change the educational world for good in one fell swoop.

I think that if you can finish it, then it is a brilliant idea. And I dont think that it is a hard sell either, provided you can get the status quo to pull it's head out of the sand for a few minutes.

The problem might be that your idea may be actually too far ahead of its time. I see virtual universities as a technological inevitabilty for our future, but as far as I have seen, your the only one to have attempted it with a game engine using the MMORPG framework.

Dont get me wrong, Im onboard with your idea, 100%, it makes sense on many different levels, and hopefully you will be able to do it, but pioneering an idea like that is certainly going to see its share of obstacles. I hope you can do it.