My dad is a professor and I feel like he would have made this mistake too. He’s a good guy just really not tech savvy. I imagine if a red flag popped saying “this student broke the testing protocol” he would be much more likely to dish the standard punishment than try to use the confusing software to get to the bottom of it.

I get that, my dad is an engineer and these days they use pretty complicated modeling software, so he just a ignores it and improvised material choices/dimensions and such during construction. I mean it’s not like it’s reasonable to expect trained professionals to know what they are doing or educate themselves on how the software they use works.

I've heard engineering defined as something like "using a proven set of techniques to solve a number of well described problems" .

With covid there's a load of new difficult problems to solve, all of the usual in person tools are now prohibited, and staff are (at least in some places I heard) at risk of losing their pensions if they strike.