[froindt]

In my AP Statistics class, we had a few weeks after the test before school was out. We had to do a statistics project, and the teacher didn't particularly care what it was.

We were checking which candy was most popular from a giant bowl, and went classroom to classroom just asking a randomly selected student to pick a piece of candy.

We got 100% on the report, which included "We didn't inform the participants of and potential harm from participating in the study. We're heartless bastards, oh well."

Then I went to college and helped in quite a few study designs with a Professor who had worked with over 30 IRB's across his career. Ours was by far the most strict. We were primarily doing software usability studies, and every single question we would ask a participant needed to be verbatim. Your data anonymization, destruction, and analysis plans had to be fully defined, including storing the participant name to UID key separately from the data.

Deviation or asking follow-up questions based on a prior response was either not allowed or a whole additional huge layer of SCRUTINY (I'm not sure). I'm genuinely curious how any sort of therapy focused study could have occurred with that IRB.

[mmooss]

Maybe the professor was training you and didn't care about the value of your undergraduate study, which was almost certainly not worth the professor's time otherwise.

[froindt]

Late reply, but that experience was actually in grad school. I was involved with research as an undergrad as well, but it was definitely confusing from how I stated things.

I was funded through a DARPA grant. It was definitely not a training exercise.

[CharlieDigital]

This is also my take; it's part of the process of practical transfer of knowledge and process.

He did extra work, but it was effectively practice.