The traditional introductory-level meterstick-balancing lab assumes that students already know what torque is and that they readily identify it as a physical quantity of interest. We propose a modified version of this activity in which students qualitatively and quantitatively measure the amount of force required to keep the meterstick level. The setup for this experiment also introduces upward forces in addition to downward forces. In this very accurate experiment, the torque equation can be discerned directly from the data, and torque's symmetry between upward and downward forces naturally arises.