At our university, students in introductory physics classes perform a laboratory exercise to measure the range of a projectile fired at an assigned angle. A set of photogates is used to determine the initial velocity of the projectile (the launch velocity). We noticed a systematic deviation between the experimentally measured range and the range calculated using the speed as determined by the photogates. In this paper, we will discuss the origin of this systematic error and derive a simple formula to correct it. In particular, we find that the launch speed given by our instrument is significantly different from the actual launch speed of our projectile.