112: "No, stop, you're doing the lab too effectively"

The title of this post is about an interaction I had with my lab professor today in 346. It was ridiculous. We were going about doing the lab, and I had the idea to employ our tools in a specific way that would allow us to collect our data in a pre-collated format (as a .csv file), using the oscilloscope to record values over about 20 seconds, rather than gathering a bunch of data points by hand, using a multimeter.

This was apparently "against the spirit of the lab", and I can vaguely understand where he was coming from, that the lab is a place of learning, and that attempting to speedrun the task can be detrimental to the learning of the curriculum, but that is not the kind of thing that we worry about in a third year semiconductors lab. In order for me to make it this far, I have already taken part in at least 5 EE specific lab classes, not to mention the non-EE labs I've taken, I sure know how to record data, and actually, professor, getting the lab done as soon as possible is absolutely my team's primary goal in the lab.

I didn't change anything fundamental, I literally pressed two buttons on the oscilloscope and wired it slightly differently than you normally would, and then I had a more effective method of recording lab data, using the tools we were given. He compared it to a fully automated setup, and like sure, this is closer to full automation than to doing every step by hand, but my god, it's 2025, we do not have to be reading out numbers one by one, we have TECHNOLOGY. We even build the circuit and changed the input values by hand, the only thing we had even remotely optimized was the data collection and output, and even still it took us a few tries.

This is the same lab class that hasn't had anything due for literally 3 weeks because this same professor is trying to use some fancy external grading software and just... gave up on it? Didn't implement it? I don't know what the hell he's doing, and I'm not really complaining, because it means I don't have to turn anything in, but it definitely doesn't give him much credibility in terms of the "spirit of the lab".