I think that example is a bit unfair, teaching really isn't scientific when you get to the core of it. You cannot expect professors to be able to conduct double blind studies with student grades and so a more overarching non-scientific discussion is probably more amenable to actual improvement in performance.
You can actually conduct scientific studies on teaching and grading, but that is not the point I was making. What concerned me is how a department full of scientists wasted their time discussing the importance of results which were statistically meaningless. The scatter was just noise yet we wasted hours (days) of our time discussing the supposed importance of this noise.
