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Made Up Data?


Eternalx

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Yeah, my entire class made up results for a biology lab on enzymes. We did it twice and it didn't work either time, our teacher told us that writing a conclusion of everything that went wrong in our lab and then not having correct results wasn't going to be good enough for the IBO. We would have had to repeat the entire lab over and over. So she let us make up results.

I also made up some data for my Math project. There was no way I was going to measure 300 people, so I took whatever the school nurse had measured (around 100 people), asked another 50 how tall they were and made up the rest. I basically added and subtracted a few centimetres from the supposed average height of each age-group. Alter your figures by a bit, and if you want, put an anomaly there that's way outside the expected range. then you can write all about the mistakes you may have made that caused that "result".

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its not uncommon, considering the sample sizes that the IBO usually wants for sufficient data.

i'm willing to admit that i've skewed my results to help make my point and that i know lots of my friends are making up data for their extended essays. i probably will do that for my ee as well, just get a couple of filled in surveys and "extrapolate" the data to make up the rest, as long as they aren't to farfetched, what's the harm and who has to know xP?

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:D you make it sound like its a rarity.

i bet everyone has done it at least once in ib,

you'd have to be crazy to actually physically get all the required data, eg. extended essay

my teacher said that for my topic a decent sample size is 100 people, my jaw like plummeted when i heard it

printed about 50....

close enough :hmmph:

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  • 2 weeks later...

For our physics lab reports, my whole class (exactly 4 of us) usually makes up their readings. but the only time we do this is when we dont have enought time to do the experiment or our data is really really inaccurate (like a discrepancy of 200%). but as a word of advice, dont make your data too accurate, try to keep the discrepancy above 5 or 10%, because then they will be suspicous.

plus, i actually see no harm in making up readings becuz your still gonna do the actuall lab report which is basically the most difficult part, not doing the actual lab, so dont feel bad about this either

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