The Evil Tutor's Guide

Make sure you have professional axes starting at the 0/0 origin. If you have measured something at three different temperatures, like 25 C, 30 C, and 35 C, make sure your x-axis starts at 0 C. You can demonstrate your genius by using Kelvin and still make your graph start at 0.

You are often reminded to put proper units on the graphs. Nobody told you to put divisions in there, hehe! When confronted with the fact that the axis doesn’t have divisions, just blame the software you used.

Put proper divisions and tick marks, even put the unit under it, but trick out your tutor by not labelling the divisions, so it remains unclear whether the tickmarks indicate 1,2,3 or maybe 10,20,30.

When forced to label the axes, comply by labelling them with the right units, but have your revenge by leaving out the dimensions.

Make sure the x axis doesn’t follow a linear, log or any other known function. For example, when your results are x/y pairs (as opposed to equidistant x values) use Microsoft Excel, choose the wrong graph type and say “but the software did it like that” as an excuse. Put the icing on the cake by drawing the wrong conclusions from your graph because of the distorted shape of the graph due to the non-linear axis.