I've constructed my fake data so as to make the effect as bad as possible, but this is the sort of thing that really happens with a lot of graphs. These students have done a terrible job of taking the data, right? No, they did the data collection right, but were tripped up by Excel. The graph I get from students is almost always something like this: Let's say, for example, that we're doing a lab that asks students to measure two things that are proportional to one another- the magnetic field along the axis of a coil for various currents, for example. This is a constant source of irritation, as the default settings are carefully chosen so as to make it difficult for students to do a good job of data presentation. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we're more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the intro engineering course supposedly are taught how to work with Excel, and it's kind of difficult to buy a computer without it these days, so it eliminates the "I couldn't do anything with the data" excuse for not doing lab reports).
Yesterday's bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the "Why Does Excel Suck So Much?" post I've been meaning to do for a while.
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