I’ve been buried in lab grading for a lot of this week, but I’m finally down to the last few stragglers. The experience has me thinking a bit about what we’re doing here, and talking to people in other departments, and it seems like a good question for my wise and worldly readers.
At the moment, we run on 10-week terms, and in a ten-week term, we typically do seven labs (the other three are canceled to make time for exams, or to avoid doing labs in the first or last week of the term. Some fraction of those seven labs are full formal reports, with an abstract, introduction, procedure, results, and discussion/conclusion sections.
The question is, what is the appropriate number of such reports in a seven-lab introductory level course:
Would your answer be different for the introductory majors course than for the alegbra-based “pre-med” course?