I had an experience that confirms the coming of idiocracy

So I was in my CHEM 1225 lab last tuesday, and we were doing a pretty simple experiment that was almost the exact same as the experiment the week before. The week before, we had performed a reaction with various concentrations of the reactants to see what effect that had on the reaction rate. This week, we were doing the same thing, but instead of changing the concentrations, we were changing the temperature. Pretty fucking simple change, IMO. The procedure was nearly identical, and it wasn't hard to read.

We're in pairs in the lab. Luckily, my lab partner isn't a complete artard. However, there was this pair behind us that seemed to be absolutely lost. One of the guys had to keep coming over to us and asking us to do every step of the way, like they needed us to hold their hands or something. Like I said, the procedure was simple, and we had done almost the exact same experiment the week before.

In the experiment, one of the things we were doing was recording the reaction time, with stopwatches. We needed to know how many seconds it took for the reaction to finish. Since the stopwatches gave the time in minutes and seconds (3:22, for example,) we had to convert that to only seconds (202 seconds using the same example.) Well, next thing you know, the guy walks over and I kid you not, I'm not exaggerating in the least, he asks us how to convert from minutes and seconds to seconds.

If you're anything like me, your jaw is probably somewhere on the floor right now. Yes, this really happened, in a college class. Not only a college class, but the second of a 2-class series (you take Chem 1215 the semester before 1225, usually.) On top of that, it was an experiment that we had basically already done the week before (when we also had to record reaction time and convert it.)

What's worse, he had a hard time understanding it when I tried to explain to him how to do it.