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Originally Posted by Matt G
Man this thread makes me feel like I wasted money the first 2 years of college!
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In principle, a student should have some notion of experimental design after their first college statistics course. In practice, only a subset of the simpler sorts of experiments are covered, and many students pass the course based more on their understanding of other material.
Many four year science and engineering degrees require a junior or senior level course that has a much more significant focus on experimental design. However, the real research world is much broader than what can be considered in any single semester course, and few (if any) undergraduate courses do much in terms of addressing uncertainty and confidence levels in cases of non-normal distributions. Other science and engineering degrees work in experimental design and uncertainty analysis into their laboratory coursework.
None of it is terribly hard, but it is specialized, depending on the type of experiment and goals of the study. It requires focus and attention to detail to determine which calculation is needed and when.