3.+Striving+for+Accuracy+&+Precision

STRIVING FOR ACCURACY AND PRECISION

I think everyone my age tends to be sloppy with work at some time, as is neither as accurate nor as precise as it could be. I think this often does happen during activities which I know are not graded; it feels more flexible and I definitely tend to slack off. However, I also often find myself making careless errors during tests or activities that are graded. This is a picture of one of our mole activities:

Notice how I didn't even bother to erase some numbers, messily crossing them out instead. Here is our mini-quiz on quantitative chemistry:

I made sure to list everything out clearly and in spaced-out lines. Since I knew this was a harder concept for me, and a small mistake could drastically change my answer. Before, I would never write out the elements or the equation first, but now I have learned to do this for the sake of accuracy and neatness. Unfortunately, I still ended up making a careless mistake: solving for CO2 instead of CaO :(  This was the quiz "re-take":

Finally! I have mastered writing things out clearly, as well as not making careless errors! Although I still get the urge to slack off sometimes, I am well-aware of how much easier things are for me when I write things out neatly. It definitely helps reduce the probability of careless mistakes as well. My group also learned to apply accuracy and precision in our labs. One of our labs involved making a solution that would be later used for another lab. Mrs. Knowles warned us that if the first solution was not made correctly, the second lab would not produce the correct results. This scared us enough to make sure all our measurements were precise as possible, with accuracy to every last decimal place.



Whether or not this level of precision was needed, we were satisfied with the work and effort we had put into this lab, and the follow-up lab went smoothly as well (:  //12/16/11//