Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Erasing is Illegal

This is what my professor and TA told me yesterday in class. It turns out that field books used in surveying automatically become legal documents, even the ones we use in class. Because of their legal status, erasing is a big no-no. If we make a mistake we have to cross it out (while still making it possible to read what has been crossed out) and re-write it.

This is a huge problem for me because I'm kind of a perfectionist when it comes to having things neat and tidy. I caught myself erasing stray pencil marks. I erased and re-wrote some numbers to make them more centered in the graph. My tally marks were a little crooked so I erased and did those again, too. My TA said that he'll take off one point for every eraser mark he sees.

I hope I don't fail because of this.

3 comments:

Polly @ Pieces by Polly said...

Given that you're not allowed to erase, I'm surprised you're not required to use pens. Lab notebooks are somewhat similar. We had to use pens. I don't know that they're "legal documents" but you're not supposed to erase them either. You're also supposed to fill up all the pages in order and put an X through any blank space you don't use on a page before going on to the next page.

Bryan Lewis said...

I asked my TA if I could just use a pen to avoid the temptation of erasing, but he said that using a pencil is required, too. Go figure.

Kathy Haynie said...

Sloppy tally marks?? The world will end.

My dad did a lot of surveying, and he has VERY tidy printing, and he always writes in pencil Guess that's why.