<p>[Fraud</a> in science: Liar! Liar! | The Economist](<a href=“Liar! Liar!”>Liar! Liar!)</p>
<p>How much of an issue do you think this is in HS competitions?</p>
<p>Lol, there’s a “Bogus Science” class at Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>As for the article, that doesn’t surprise me at all - I have definitely, though not in any sort of serious science-y thing, “[dropped] data points based on a gut feeling” when doing a lab in a physics or chem class or something. Usually it’s more based on… a gut feeling that I totally screwed up that test anyway so the point is invalid, rather than on a feeling that “oh I am so so right and that point doesn’t quite fit what I think so it MUST BE WRONG! I’m dropping it from my results!”</p>
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<p>Even more interesting is when people replicated his experiment they often found values larger than his. However, because Millikan was so well known and regarded, they would reject their measured values as incorrect. They’d keep working on their experimental setup and calculations until they would get similar to values he had, assuming he must have performed the experiment more correctly than themselves.</p>