"Gatekeeping" in Intro Chem Lab

Over at Chemjobber, there's an interesting discussion around "gatekeeping" - intentionally using introductory science courses as weed-outs to restrict access to higher-level material - and whether anyone actually does this in practice. Although I don't think of my experience in these terms, I'll relate my recollections and let readers judge for themselves.

Stone walkway, 2014

At Big State University, I was part of a teaching assistant (TA) team tackling Chemistry 101 lab. These were classic experiments: density, dilutions, diffracting light, quantitative analysis, titrations, measuring exotherms. TAs not only ran labs, but lectured beforehand, graded reports, filled out student evaluations, and tallied final grades. 

While the content wasn't enough to weed out dedicated students, the lab policies certainly may have been. The implied ideology went: "if you can't follow these rules now, you'll never cut the higher-level labs." 

Pass in a report 1 minute past the start of lecture? Zero. 

Handwritten report? Zero.

Blatant disregard for lab equipment? Zero.

Show up to lab without proper PPE? Go home. 

If a student had not replaced broken glassware by semester's end? Fail.

Evidence of plagiarism from the lab manual or suspected from others' reports? Fail. 

Miss the final exam? (Yes, a final lab exam...) Fail.

Though the TAs tried valiantly to corral teach the ~400 students who came through our section each semester, my honest memory was that we usually kept fewer than 250 by term's end.

Remember When?

Remember how we used to generate research reports?

"The scientist in a pharmaceutical company prepares his compound documents, using a variety of text and graphics systems, in a laborious cut-and-paste procedure, and transmits a hard copy to a records center, where photocopies and microforms are made and indexing takes place. When the end-user wants to retrieve his report, he asks an intermediary to do a search. The result will be a report number or access address. The hard-copy report then has to be manually retrieved, perhaps copied or printed, and delivered by mailman to the end-user. . . it is also evident that research end-users are not accessing full-text online databases to any large extent."

 - From J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci., 1991

It's truly amazing how quickly technology has accelerated online publication in the intervening two decades.

Public library lintel, USA

Update (Aug 3) - Derek Lowe weighs in:

@SeeArrOh Yep, that's how my continuation exam in grad school was done. Typewriter, plastic template, rub-on letters. Just before @Chemdraw.
— Derek Lowe (@Dereklowe) August 4, 2014