Doctored

"You may begin.."

So everyone dashed into ruffling the test paper while some still struggled to get their Newton Meter properly clamped to the retort stand - just like the supervisor's . I was doing the latter, but soon gave up for the former.

When I got the hang of things, I set about getting the apparatus in working condition. The whole lab was clanking and crashing away as half a kilogram weights refused to stay in the air and the nimble Newton meters slipped between the teeth of the clamps.

Tedious work I tell you. Clamp. Then unclamp. Position the hanging weight, then reposition, remove the boss, only to add it again. G-clamps WERE NOT made for physics experiments, especially if you have 30 minutes to collect raw data.

Heaved a sigh of relief when I had 6 sets of readings. Now - graph drawing. The moment I set about plotting, I knew I had to do something radical. Since they wanted the y-intercept, the x-axis must start from zero, BUT 1/sinØ must always be more that 1, so all my plots were clumped to one side. I gave up when I realised that the gradient was really off.

30 minutes more before I hand over the paper - should I collect data again? No, too late, too late.

I had Rooster's Come Get Some in my head. That prompted me to do something bold.

I worked my way backwards. Saw the equation, reduced it to y = mx + c. Identified my m(gradient) - the value of which should correspond to the weights we were given, then returned to my graph. Honestly, I only kept 2 of my data intact, the rest were left to my discretion. I doctored all my point, and even had the nerve to make my best-fit curve look like one, meaning to say, I had purposely planted one point up the line and another below, to balance it out.

5 minutes left to the clock, and I was feeling guilty. Do they penalise for doctoring your results? Then again, too late to make my data believable.

Mr. Tan was smiling away as a bunch of us related how we had to be completely dishonest. His only comment was "Smart, smart. Good lar….no choice what, even my one, my gradient was 0.9 kg…good, good…"