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It depends on what the student thinks she is communicating when she says (reading off the calculator) that the volume of the rectangular solid (H = 5.67 cm, L = 3.25 cm, W = 4.11 cm--as measured in lab) is 75.737025 cm^3. This is a typical situation where significant figures (digits) are introduced and they work well enough for this. They also work fairly well for most other intro level experiments. Having 4 'guard' digits in the answer seems more confusing to me--does the student really understand the level of uncertainty in the answer?... I suspect that the primary thing most instructors
are dealing with is students multiplying two values on their calculators and
then writing down every digit that appears.
Is that a problem? Why should that be a problem? Tell me,
please, who is harmed by those "extra" digits? How does the
cost of keeping "extra" digits compare to the cost of keeping
too few digits?