Scientific integrity threatened

I had a friend who was taking an advanced chemistry class, and she told me that she ans other students in her class routinely falsified lab results to make them conform more closely to predicted values. When I tried to point out that falsification is a gross breach of scientific ethics, not least because it fails to produce the anomalous results that spur scientific 'revolutions', she explained that it was only because in her class one would get a lower grade if one's lab results weren't within a specified range, adding that obsolete and degraded equipment in her lab precluded accurate measurement even by the most conscientious experimenters.

Of course, when her class graduates to go to work for monitoring agencies, research institutions, and other laboratories that are highly susceptible to funding cutoffs, they will come under even GREATER pressure to get the "right" results, while the equipment used in some cases will be worse than at a state university.

My friend assured me that she would never falsify results in the real world, only in the classroom where it had no practical effects beyond her own career. However, the situation as she describes it constitutes training to disregard scruples in the pursuit of personal reward; training that well serves, say, the snake-oil peddlers at Merck and the Mayo Clinic.

First and foremost, a bright student should not be punished for running an experiment correctly but getting anomalous results. Although it may mean more work for an already overburdened class, this should be a starting point for a hypothesis explaining the unexpected results (perhaps the lab equipment is to blame) and an experiment designed to test this hypothesis. On the assumption that the experiment confirms this particular hypothesis, it would serve to spur demands that the university provide students with the equipment vital to scientific education, and combined with statistical analysis of lab results it would help expose a culture of cheating.

My final thought on this: science is a particular method of testing hypotheses by means of open inquiry. If a university department teaches you to ignore empirical results that don't correspond to predetermined ideal results, that department is not teaching science; in fact, it is actively destroying the scentific part of your mind and replacing it with dogmatism.