Laboratory exercises are an important part of education in many science and engineering subjects, which is why it is important to make sure that they provide good results. We present a view of problems that can arise when students are not expected to exhibit autonomous thinking in the lab, but rather rely on step-by-step or cookbook instructions. We have conducted a survey to establish that this issue is well recognized by many lab supervisors. In order to solve some of these problems, we present suggestions for how the labs can be tuned to encourage more independent thinking among the students to enhance their learning and their engagement in the exercise.