Who does what which way?

[cjsmith]

Lab notebooks:
Have a separate lab notebook or make drawings and notes all over the manual?
Carbon-copied prenumbered pages or a spiral-bound notebook?
Take them home to do the writeup, or leave them locked up in the lab?
Do your work elsewhere and copy it in, or print it out and staple it in, or record every piece of data by hand directly into the notebook at the time the measurement was taken?
Strike through a mistake or recopy the page?

On every one of these questions, each of my professors insists that the ways the others do things are wrong. It's almost funny to watch them put value judgments on these answers, all the while conflicting massively with each other. At least, it would be funny if the whole mess didn't have consequences for me personally. As a student, I don't get to be self-righteous and snooty; I get to OBEY. It's dizzying trying to memorize three different protocols. Perhaps the bookstore should hand out laminated cards showing the answer key for each professor. Not the answers to the homework or quiz problems, no; the answers to their particular brand of This Is The Way Everyone Should Do Things.

As the quarter wears on, of course, we're supposed to do all these things as second nature. It's like learning to touch-type when every day you get a new keyboard layout.

Homework:
Bother to do the problems or just write enough to show you know how you WOULD do it?
Turn it in during lab, during lecture, or not at all?
Are crossouts or white-out acceptable inside a pile of calculations (because We're Learning Here) or not acceptable (because This Is College-Level Work)?

Etc., etc., etc.
Round a 5 up no matter what, or round to the evens?
Work in groups in lab (because That's The Right Way To Learn), or work alone (because That's The Right Way To Learn)?

In France, when I lived there (1989), there were three different keyboard layouts in common use. In all the computer programming offices I saw, I met not a single touch-typist. My own rapid typing branded me as a bit of a freak.

Comments

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

the answers to their particular brand of This Is The Way Everyone Should Do Things

Welcome to University, where learning isn't learning the subjects as much as it is learning each prof's answers to that, although I think it's much more pronounced in lower-level undergrad courses. :-)

[psi-star-psi.livejournal.com]

I think this is around the point where I invested in Erasable Ink pens. Which is Very Wrong, and I will go to Experimentalist Hell. (Where I will shove a rocket engine up their nose and wire them to the high voltage supply. Hey, it's Hell!)

Which doesn't help you in this regard. I dodged experimental science for just this sort of reason. My senior lab partner kept 4-5 different colored pens that he used for all of his notations. He's a nut, but I repeat myself.

Anyways, my sympathies. I suppose you could make your own reference cards, if you can figure out the rules for a given course.

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

And sell the reference cards!

[psi-star-psi.livejournal.com]

Step 3: Profit!

[ken_r]

Perhaps the bookstore should hand out laminated cards showing the answer key for each professor.

Since you need to keep track anyways, type it up in a little table, with notes emphasizing the Dire Consequences of Doing it Wrong. Maybe leave some blanks for filling in additional professors' names later. Maybe print up a few extra copies, just in case one or two of your classmates can't keep track either. And if an anonymous copy should happen to make it into one of your professors' hands, maybe they'll get a kick out of it, and/or be a bit less snooty about it. (Just don't be too rude in the comments, in case it gets traced back to you.)

If you want to get serious about it, collect data from a few students who have other professors, and make the suggestion to the bookstore next term, with partial data already provided (and suitable disclaimers about how these are just some students' notes, and the professors are the Source of All Truth, etc). Laminated cards would be cute, but printed sheets can be updated with corrections or data on other professors.

[zianuray.livejournal.com]

Maybe you could do a flowchart on each of these professors and sell copies!

[leback.livejournal.com]

I'm not usually eager to recommend More Bureaucracy, but sounds like the college would benefit from establishing a standardized lab-notebook protocol (in consultation with the professors who teach these labs, of course) and obliging all instructors to accept student work that adheres to the protocol. Everybody would think the protocol was Wrong, of course, but perhaps they could be persuaded that this was actually a good learning experience for students -- after all, in any professional setting, the obligation to adhere to bureaucratic conventions is likely to trump doing things optimally some of the time...

Meanwhile, these kinds of issues remind me of why I was always a disaster in labs, and could never have been any sort of experimental/applied scientist. Precision and detail-management are *so* not my thing.

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

That's a truly amazing anecdote! Stay sane!

[apparentparadox]

The same kind of thing happens in cooking classes (and in commercial kitchens in the real world).

I think that the answer is to try your best, and always apologize and say that you'll try to do better if the instructor complains about one of those stupid things.

[jcgbigler.livejournal.com]

Here are my preferred answers, based on having worked in a lab in industry and on trying to teach high school juniors to do something that is a high-school equivalent.

Lab notebooks:
Have a separate lab notebook or make drawings and notes all over the manual?

Separate lab notebook.

Carbon-copied prenumbered pages or a spiral-bound notebook?

Not a spiral-bound notebook--too easy to tear pages out, and you should never remove pages from a lab notebook. I have my kids use a 75-cent composition notebook. If the pages aren't numbered, they have to hand-number them.

Pre-numbered lab notebooks are nice, mind you, though I don't find the carbons terribly useful.

Take them home to do the writeup, or leave them locked up in the lab?

In a school situation, take them home. In a real-life lab where you're expected to spend some of your work time doing analysis, keep them in the building.

Do your work elsewhere and copy it in, or print it out and staple it in, or record every piece of data by hand directly into the notebook at the time the measurement was taken?

Definitely record directly into the notebook. Original data shouldn't be copied--it introduces the possibility of copying errors. One of my students last year wrote his data on his hand. I made him photocopy his hand, tape the photocopy into the notebook, and sign his name across each piece of tape so that the signature extended onto both the photocopy and the notebook page. (This is what I had to do in industry when I taped an instrument read-out into a lab notebook.)

Strike through a mistake or recopy the page?

Strike through. A lab notebook is supposed to be your diary of your experiments. Neatness doesn't matter (though readability and the ability to follow what you did is important).

The real point of a lab notebook is to have something that would stand up as evidence in court if you ever had to prove that you invented something. The "rules" for taking data are intended to prevent things that would create doubt in court as to whether you actually did the experiments as documented. This is why changing any data in the notebook is so bad--it creates doubt about everything else in the notebook.

Homework:
Bother to do the problems or just write enough to show you know how you WOULD do it?

If it's collected, bother. If it's not collected, just make damn sure you could do it entirely through on an exam.

Turn it in during lab, during lecture, or not at all?

Depends on the prof's rules.

Are crossouts or white-out acceptable inside a pile of calculations (because We're Learning Here) or not acceptable (because This Is College-Level Work)?

I don't see a problem with crossouts. No white-out in lab notebooks, but I don't see a problem with it on homework.

Etc., etc., etc.
Round a 5 up no matter what, or round to the evens?

Ask the prof. Some profs don't teach rounding to the evens. I tried to teach it once to my high school kids a few years back, and it confused them terribly.

Work in groups in lab (because That's The Right Way To Learn), or work alone (because That's The Right Way To Learn)?

Ultimately, you need to be able to do both. Decide which one you suck most at, and practice that one more often.

[jcgbigler.livejournal.com]

I should also mention that one of the first things I tell my students is that everyone has different rules and formats for lab notebooks. There's no one right way to do it (no matter what their future professors may say). My rules are based on things that are common in research labs and industry, and that appear to me to be consistent with what I believe are the goals of keeping the lab notebook.

It's amazing how many profs in college still have their students copy the entire procedure into the lab notebook before doing the experiment. In a real research situation, you'd be making up the procedure as you go along and writing it down as you do it, so this is what I have my students do from day one, even in a high school lab.

[sharya.livejournal.com]

These are the identical answers to what I was going to type, based on my (and my husband's since he's a chemist!) experience as well.

The lab notebook becomes especially crucial in a forensic toxicology situation.

[jcgbigler.livejournal.com]

Glad to see that I'm being consistent with the views of others who work in the field. I think high schools and colleges have far too many "lifers" who don't have the perspective that comes from non-academic real-world experience.

I think a lot of the stupid rules about lab notebooks come from teachers and professors who are trying to do what they think is the "right thing" without ever having actually experienced the "right thing" themselves.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

One of my students last year wrote his data on his hand. I made him photocopy his hand, tape the photocopy into the notebook, and sign his name across each piece of tape so that the signature extended onto both the photocopy and the notebook page. (This is what I had to do in industry when I taped an instrument read-out into a lab notebook.)

That is AWESOME. I've heard of the tape-and-signature method, but it turns out none of my teachers this quarter uses that one! :-)

[jcgbigler.livejournal.com]

I had thought briefly about telling him that it needed to be a notarized copy, but I didn't want to bother the one overworked secretary whom I know to be a notary.

[meep.livejournal.com]

What? No one has yet asked about the keyboard layouts?

Okay, I can think of two standard layouts off the top of my head: QWERTY and Dvorak. So which ones were in use at your French job?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Two versions of AZERTY. They rearranged all the special characters. I could touch-type pretty well on them because of the similarities to QWERTY, but I had serious problems any time I had to type a symbol.

edit: oh, and QWERTY, to round out the three. That one wasn't popular because of the difficulty of typing accented characters on it; the two AZERTY layouts had all the French accented characters handy. But QWERTY was common, probably because it's manufactured in large numbers, so there were always a handful of keyboards around that nobody wanted to use. :-)