this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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My high-school chemistry teacher would dock a point for each extra digit past the calculation's actual precision. We learned quickly not to overstate our sig figs.
An answer written as "3" means that the true value is somewhere between 2½ and 3½. If you write "3.19142" when what you actually know is "3", you're incorrectly excluding the vast majority of the possible true values.
Our physics teacher taught measurements and uncertainties as the very first thing in our multi-year syllabus. All answers thereafter needed to be in the precision implied from the number of significant figures in the given figures and error propagation.