JoinWhy Do Students “Cook” Data? A Case Study on the Tenacity of Misconceptions
This paper describes an extraordinary example of data fabrication in which two students and their course instructor are so certain that they know how an experiment should turn out that they repeatedly dismiss contradictory data until they finally report “cooked” experimental results instead of rejecting their faulty hypothesis. Replacing verification labs with real inquiries would reduce the motivation for such data fabrication.