Reflections on teaching and science.

I’m reflecting on teaching. Which in itself can be good, as long as it isn’t so much reflection that you end up in a mirror maze with copies of your thoughts to infinity and beyond.

But, in this case, the reflection was prompted by a post from John Horgan, where he speculated that perhaps the current reproducibility crisis could be traced to practices in teaching the labs. Supposedly students would fudge data obtained to get it correct on reports, in order to get good grades.
Fudging data-points is not something that would get you better grades in psychology. It really isn’t a point in doing so for grade purposes (at least where I have been), because we know damned well how hard it is to get significant results so grading is never based on whether your experiment worked out or not. I actually had one of my profs telling me…