I had a similar experience in Physics 101 and Chemistry 101. The labs were chaotic and had limited time. If you were even a little bit unlucky it would be impossible to even finish them let alone get remotely decent results.

I'm convinced 60% of the class faked results or copied many results from previous year's students.

This is how I remember my own undergrad physics and chemistry labs: Terrible equipment and no time. The students who turned in faked but plausible data that looked like what the professor expected to see would get A's and the students who actually did the experiments and reported the crap they measured got lower grades. Everyone just learned the wrong lesson: Figure out what the data should look like and fake it.