Nonconforming products are students who do not meet course or program requirements, courses/programs that failed to achieve stated objectives, as well as research projects that did not meet specified contract requirements. Research activities have such a nature that sometimes a failure to prove a hypothesis is a valuable research result. In this case a `failure' is not necessarily identical to nonconformance. Only when a con- tract with industry or a research sponsor exists should this ISO 9001 element be applied in research.