You're certainly correct that the true value would have been in our error bars, and one of those good teachers I acknowledge the existence of in my large paragraph, sarcastic as it may be, could conceivably have had us run such a garbage experiment and shown that as bad as it was, our error bars still did contain the correct value for probably all but one student or something like that. There's some valuable truth in that result too. Cutting edge science is often in some sense equivalently the result of bodging together a lot of results that in 30 year's hindsight will also be recognized as garbage methodology and experiments, not because the cutting edge researchers are bad people but because they were the ones pushing the frontier and building the very tools that later people would use to do those precision experiments with later. I always try to remember the context of early experiments when reading about them decades later.

It would also have been interesting to combine all the data together and see what happened. There's a decent chance that would have been at least reasonably close to the real value despite all the garbage data, which again would have been an interesting and vivid lesson.

This is part of the reason this is something that stuck with me. There were so many better things to do than just fail someone for not lying about having gotten the "correct" result. I'm not emotional about anything done to me over 30 years ago, but I'm annoyed in the here and now that this is still endemic to the field and the educational process, and this is some small effort to help push that along to being fixed.