Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Here's a draft of my proposal to replace the laboratory group notebooks and individual reports with individual lab journals for whatever engineering classes are applicable:

Problem: in laboratory student groupings, despite having a rotating assignment of leader and secretary, the same students are doing the same job experiment after experiment: making the circuits, recording the data, writing in the notebook, and making the computations, while one or two don't do anything, sometimes even arriving late because they know the other group members are reliable enough to start the work by themselves.

Even though they are admonished to copy the recorded measurements before passing their notebooks (and warning them of a penalty) students still use the excuse of the photocopier being already closed (especially for afternoon classes) to borrow the submitted notebook from the teacher afterwards. They dislike the idea of having a draft of the data first before writing it in the notebook, then keeping the draft as their copy for when making their reports.

Individual reports, which are supposed to be practice for when the graduates are already making reports for their jobs, are not fulfilling its purpose as reports are rushed on the day before submission, and the figures and graphs are either drawn by hand in sometime inadequate spaces in the middle of the printout, placed out of order at the end of the report, or are just photocopies of the page from the notebook and glued to the paper.

Students rarely use the available software (such as Excel, Visio and Paint) to come up with impressive figures for their report, which would definitely pull up their grades.

The individual lab journal forces each student to ask for a particular part of the experiment to be his, since he can only write in his lab journal what he worked on, leaving in all the incorrect circuit connections or wrong computations, which are, after all, part of experiment documentation.

The teacher will give low marks for those students who both say that they worked on the same part (either circuits, computation or tabulation). In other words, all high marks will be given to the students who practice true delegation of labor.

Since the three individual reports used to be 30% of a student's lab grade, and the group notebook is 15%, that means 45% is freed up to be allotted to the lab journal.

Instead, 25% can be for the lab journal, then 20% could be for a single individual report that can be submitted during the third week of classes, and revised repeatedly until the student passes an exemplary report, with proper figures, tabulation, graphs and analysis.

Session 2169 will not slack anymore. Class dismissed.