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ect from among the different agents, one or two that will give "positive results." I have been doing active research for about half a year testing the different agents. As for the fundamental questions raised, I am positive that it would make no difference in what field of science I were to work.
By now I have had enough course work to realize that when performing any assigned laboratory exercise--they should not be called experiments--even of a cook-book type, little or even major discrepancies arise, and always on the initial trials, no matter how carefully one works! As you are probably aware, the teaching assistant in charge of the lab or the instructor, generally runs through the exercise before the class does in order to get the "bugs" out of it--I am deliberately generalizing, since the above holds for all of the laboratory sciences--so when the student gets confusing or rather contradictory results, the instructor can deftly point out the error in the setup or calculations, or what have you. He may even indicate what results may be expected. The last is critical. Similarly other students in the laboratory usually have friends who have had the course before and know what results are expected--this technique is frowned upon. Or one may consult textbooks and published papers. (This, by the way, is known as library research, and is generally conceded to be indicative of the superior student, especially if he points out the fact that he is so interested that he just had to delve into the literature.) By any technique, the expected results are always obtained. Always. And by everyone. The initial confusions--that some honest students perpetuate--are easily brushed aside as errors due to inexperience, sloppiness, lack of initiative, stupidity of congenital sort, et cetera, et cetera.
Since being a teaching fellow, even simple cook-book experiments don't seem as cook-bookish. Some pretty weird