In Australia, a common structure for an undergraduate science honours degree was to replicate a few experiments from recently published research. This gave the student practice in the key skills required for running a successful research experiment. There used to be Australian journals that specialised in publishing this type of replication research. Sure, they weren’t top tier journals, so they didn’t count for much in terms of getting tenure or winning grants, but they were respected as an important part of the process of doing science, so getting one of your honours experiments published there would definitely help in recruiting a good PhD supervisor. Also, those who did publish completely new findings would eagerly monitor the replication journals for confirmation of their results.
Unfortunately, in Australia there is also a sizeable disparity in the level of government funding between undergraduate and postgraduate students, so starting about 2010 some universities discontinued their (one year full-time) undergraduate honours programs, replacing them by (two year full-time) research masters degrees. Initially at least, the masters versions did not seem to keeping the replication model, though I lost touch with that area soon after it started, so I don’t know if that changed.
I also don’t even know how that gets fixed.
