Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

The trouble with these kinds of games is that they put the more diligent students at a disadvantage. For example, someone might compare their experimental result against the textbook constant, realise it's wrong, and spend much more time trying to identify their "mistake", not realising they've been sabotaged. This puts further pressure on their other work.

One cannot argue that this is fair on the basis that it's the "real world", because all that does is reward the sloppier (middle) approach. It filters the very lazy from the average, but at the expense of the excellent.

> because the simulator had a bug

I had something similar happen when I was taking microcomputers (a HW/SW codesign class at my school). We had hand-built (as in everything was wire wrapped) 68k computers we were using and could only download our code over a 1200-baud serial line. Needless to say, it was slow as hell, even for the day (early 2000s). So, we used a 68k emulator to do most of our development work and testing.

Late one night (it was seriously like 1 or 2 am), our prof happened by the lab as we were working and asked to see how it was going. I was project lead and had been keeping him apprised and was confident we were almost complete. After waiting the 20 minutes to download our code (it was seriously only a couple dozen kb of code), it immediately failed, yet we could show it worked on the simulator. We single-stepped through the code (the only "debugger" we had available was a toggle switch for the clock and an LED hex readout of the 16-bit data bus). I had spent enough time staring at the bus over the course of the semester that I'd gotten quite good at decoding the instructions in my head. I immediately saw that we were doing a word-compare (16-bit) instead of a long-compare (32-bit) on an address. The simulator treated all address compares are 32-bit, regardless of the actual instruction. The real hardware, of course, did not. It was a simple fix. Literally one-bit. Did it in-memory on the computer instead of going through the 20-minute download again. Everything magically worked. Professor was impressed, too.

ULN2003 is not DIP8

And I would assume for pedalogical purposes a bare transistor would be preferred rather than the '2008 with its extra diodes and base resistor.

Well, on the flip side, I had a couple of classes in which we were supposed to "critique" papers, for the laudable purpose of learning critical thinking skills and how to evaluate papers.

We also were supposed to read the greatest papers in the field to learn about the field from the primary sources, also a laudable purpose.

Unfortunately, these two things were put together, and we were expected to produce "critiques" of the greatest papers in the field.

Now, I've told this story a couple of times, and always some anklebiter jumps up from the replies to point out that even the greatest papers can have mistakes or be improved or whatever. Which is in principle true. But when Einstein comes up to you and for the first time in world history explicates his new theory of relativity, you aren't doing him, yourself, or the world a favor by "critiquing" his choice of variable names, quibbling about his phrasing, or criticizing him for not immediately knowing how to explain it the way physicists will explain it after over 120 years of chewing on it.

In practice, there is no practical way to "critique" these papers. They are the ones that have slugged it out with hundreds of thousands of other papers to be getting recommended to undergraduate students 20-40 years later. There is no reason to believe that anything a college junior, even one from decades down the line, is going to give any suggestions that can improve such papers.

So what I learned is that I can just deploy a formula: 1. Summarize the paper quickly, ideally with some tidbit in it that proves you really read it 2. Use my decades of foresight to complain that the author didn't do in this paper something the field built on it later, quite possibly led by the same author (I dunno, I didn't check of course, I'm just complaining) 3. Say "more research is needed"... it's a cliche for a reason -> Get an A every single time, despite putting no real cognitive effort into the critique.

I did at least read the papers for real, and that was fine, but my "critique" was 100% presentation, 100% genuflection of the ritual words of science, knowingly shorn of meaning. Heck, even now I don't think I feel bad about that; I just delivered what was asked for, after raising the objection once. At least we read some of the literature, and that is a skill that has served me for real, in real life, even though I did not go into academia proper.

In my high school, without naming any names, the teacher told us all that anyone who changed their results to 9.81m/s^2 was doing science incorrectly. And we were graded on our analysis of the experimental procedure, or something like that.