Honestly, you are right, but it was nearly a decade ago now. We should have seen something.
We should have done a lot of things better, actually.
Maybe we really didn't have a microscope? The apparatus was built in ~1961 and had been used yearly for the next 50 years. Any semblance of a manual had long since disappeared. Perhaps a lens or two had been raided in the 1980's ans we couldn't figure that out in the soup of other problems. I've really no idea, a decade on, which of the problems we were having that was our 'show-stopper'.
All I know is that Advanced Physics Lab (2 units) continued the time honored tradition of the Physics major breaking you, and then kicking you while you were down and laughing at your idiocy, for 4 years straight.
Somehow, I miss those times...