h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You forgot to mention error analysis, the bane of every student's life.
The important thing is to get an error. No demonstrator in my experience has ever asked me how I arrived at this value. It also helps if the error is smaller than the quantity measured. If in doubt, dividing by the answer is often useful.

Loved the remark about Newton

Theoretically after you've done all this you won't have enough data to get errors from thats my aim, anyway.
I like astronomy, I can say, I got an error of 44%, under half, thats pretty good!

I recall one lab script, something to do with radioactivity I think, with the question, "why does these results produce a straight line?" The results were so poor (I'd been given the weakest radioactive sorce in the lab) that the only honest answer was "because this question suggests they should produce a straight line." Visually, you could have fitted an exponetial curve to the data much more convincingly.

Luckily, the demonstrator marking my work agreed with me and I managed to blame rather a lot of inactivity on the weak radioactive source