The day-to-day work in a biology lab may involve sample preparation, the growth and maintenance of cell lines, and the performance of precise analytical procedures. A daily workflow in a chemistry lab may involve precise weighing and isolation, careful isolation, and purity testing with expensive instruments. But these are all easy to get wrong and hard to set up in a classroom. In a commercial or academic lab environment, people may take multiple full days of practice before trying something that they have not experienced before, sometimes with the assistance of a more practiced colleague. In school, the student has a couple of hours at most, and this includes the “pre-lab” meetings that some colleges encourage. Some of the necessities of a lab setting can mean that the student is set up for failure in all but the most trivial of labs. Instructors will often adjust their grading practices accordingly to de-emphasize an experimental outcome in favor of accurate documentation.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Failure is a critical part of scientific work, and a person with no tolerance for things going wrong will rapidly wash out of lab work. Science isn’t about being brilliant and doing everything right the first time, it is about being persistent and accurately cataloging your failures to learn from them. But if you are a student in a high school or early college setting, most of your academic journey will have been focused on getting it right. Against that backdrop, it can feel confusing or disorienting to be hurrying through an unfamiliar protocol. At the end, you may then be told – implicitly by the assignment’s grading system – that the actual outcome doesn’t matter that much.