<p>For chem labs, do people generally work together on the lab reports?</p>
<p>In that vein, is it hard to find old lab reports and use those? Where I'm coming from, a ton of students rarely used their own labs, but just took someone else's. This may sound like cheating, but it's more akin to using an electric egg-beater rather than a hand-powered whisk. With the latter, you put in 4 hours more work for precisely the same outcome, and you gain nothing in the experience.</p>
<p>You're kidding me, right? Gain nothing in experience? So discussion of theory (good labs have that, by the way) requires no creative or personal thought? Analyzing the data and providing a proper conclusion based on it is mere child's play, no need to get better at it, eh?
Either way, it's turning in someone else's work for your own self gain. That's plagarism by definition, and very definitely unethical. You can get kicked out of college for that kind of crap.</p>
<p>moreover, the labs change slightly from year to year, so full-out copying is more or less impossible</p>
<p>and if you don't do your own work, you'll get killed on the lab midterm / final</p>
<p>haha good luck with this scheme</p>
<p>No, it's definitely not child's play, but it is a huge pain in the a$$ and it's not usually on the midterm or final... I thought.</p>
<p>Anyway, plagiarism though it may be, only half the kids actually did their own chem labs at Cornell. Everyone else just, you know, copied.</p>
<p>If that's not the way it works at Penn, then I'm not going to try and get expelled.</p>
<p>well i am not sure what is going on at cornell, but people do not really do this at penn. just do the reports they are not that difficult.</p>
<p>I worked with my friends for my chem labs. There was no outright copying. That would have been stupid because we had different numbers. It was more a way to make sure we were all on the right track and avoid dumb mistakes (ex. i get 1.05, friend1 gets 0.99, friend2 gets 2.8, friend2 redos his calculation). You should work with your friends on the lab reports and discuss because it makes the time go by faster. You shouldn't copy their answers though because thats cheating.</p>