I.

Exercise 2
ACCURACY AND PRECISION IN MICROPIPETTOR MEASUREMENT
GRP 6
Lopez, Annika
Lopez, Christine
Manrique, Nichole
Monasterial, Chloe
Objectives

To be able to determine and distinguish accuracy from the precision of measured volumes of water
using micropipettes
To compute for the percent error of experimental measurements
To identify the basic parts of micropipettes and to operate them correctly for liquid measurements
To express experimental data into graphs of mean and standard deviation

II.

Results
Student Group Number

Weight of the 15 l
of water in grams
1
0.014
2
0.015
3
0.016
4
0.015
5
0.015
Mean of Weight
0.015
Standard Deviation
7.0711x10-4
Table 1. Group 6 data

Group #
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Mean Weight
0.0156 g
0.0154 g
0.0154 g
0.0152 g
0.0148 g
0.0150 g
0.0150 g
0.0154 g
0.0148 g
0.0152 g
Table 2. Collected data of all groups

Standard Deviation
1.64x10-3
8.94x10-4
1.64x10-3
1.64x10-3
8.37x10-4
7.07x10-4
7.11x10-4
5.48x10-4
4.47x10-4
4.47x10-4

Graph 1.Bar graph with the standard deviation as error bar

Percent Error=

0.0150.01518
100
0.015

= 14.67%

III. Analysis

Accuracy is a measure of how close a measured value is to the accepted or true value. It is related
to the percent error between the average volume of solution measured experimentally and the volume that
was expected (the accepted value). Smaller percent error reflects higher accuracy. Percent error can be
negative, indicating that the measured volume was smaller than the expected volume or positive,
indicating that the measured volume was larger than the expected volume. Precision measures the
closeness of a set of values obtained from identical measurements of the same quantity. It is the measure
of reproducibility of a measurement whether it is accurate or not. Precision is related to the standard
deviation of a series of measurements of the same thing. For example, if the micropipet is set to the same
volume (15 L) and five measurements are taken at this volume, a standard deviation can be taken of
these five measurements. The smaller the standard deviation, the more precise the micropipet is. We will
use the standard deviation as a measure of the spread of potential errors in a given measurement.