> you are never graded on whether you did your best and honestly report what you observe. From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got. You might hope that there comes some point in your career where that stops being the case, but as near as I can tell, it literally never does. Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works.

This, so much this. I disliked any lab work in my science classes (in HS/College) for this exact reason. I can't tell you how many numbers I fudged because I wasn't getting the "right" results and there was no time/appetite/interest in figuring out why it was wrong, my options were lie and get a good grade or report what I saw and get a bad grade.

And yes, in college specifically, the equipment we were working was rough. There was so much of "let's ask the other 2 groups near us and we will all shave our numbers a bit to match/make sense".