Top Ten Dumbest Things that Have Ever Been Done by Students in Physics Practical Tests

I have to work with absolute imbeciles like these from time to time. They do some of the most catastrophically dumb things, and it makes one wonder how they got into the class in the first place.

Or how some of them have girlfriends.
The Top Ten
Overload resistors until they catch fire

The resistor is clearly marked with a maximum of 6W, and yet, you still think it would be cool to put triple that through it? What do you think will happen?!

A classmate almost did this once - we were so lucky it didn't leave anything worse than a tiny melted spot on the desk.

Wow. Even smart people like physics students can be huge idiots from time to time.

Put the entire circuit in a water bath at 100°C instead of only the thermistor

I cursed a few expletives aloud when I caught my group doing this. The guy who was in charge when my back was turned currently aspires to be an engineer. How he will accomplish that without someone being hurt or something exploding is beyond me!

That's certainly dumb. The worst I have done in a physics practical test is to do reverse biasing of a Zener diode with a milliampere ammeter as the current measurer (instead of using a microampere ammeter).

Suspend a pendulum from the ceiling and attempt to swing from it

How old are they? Really? I'm a hard-working physics student, and I still have to put up with six-foot-tall six-year-olds!

Try to set things on fire by focusing light from a high-resistance filament bulb with glasses

A dumb thing to do, but it would be even dumber if it had worked. They tried it with my glasses, and they should know by this stage that, because I'm short-sighted, my glasses have concave lenses, which are designed to scatter light.

This incompetence pains me greatly.

Wipe USB drives clean by placing them within an inductor coil

I'd like to see the look on all of their other teachers' faces when they find out why they couldn't meet the deadline for that big assignment.

Break a suspended spring by using various random objects as weights

Also, if the spring had not broken, you'd have had the most pathetically inaccurate results. How are you supposed to calculate its spring constant like that?

Scatter light from a UV lamp using glasses

If these people actually continue to take physics, I hope they take entirely theoretical courses.

Use iPhone charger leads and a magnet to create inductor coils

And I mean they are stripping the plastic from the cables. They are walking, talking, dangerous money wasters.

Use any metal object as a resistor

To them, anything can be used, no matter whether it's destroyed.

Use tin foil as an electrical insulator

Them: "Electrons travel through tin? Never would have thought it!"
Me: "Why? Because, ever since kindergarten, we've never covered metallic properties or conductivity?"

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