Classroom lab experiment in Electronics 101

You need to rethink and repharse your question better. You can't have both "series-parallel circuit" Unfortunately this makes little sense as written " what happens to voltage drops"

I beg to differ. According to Grob's Basic Electronics, 11th edition and my Electronics professor, there are indeed series-parallel circuits. They are combination circuits that have both series and parallel connections. They are used to obtain different voltages and currents from a single supply voltage. I am curious as to what happens to the voltage drops across each resistor when a short occurs in the circuit.

This is more of an enginering question than a home repair question.

soochie - you're going to have to be more specific - what exactly is the circuit you have in mind, and where is the short? But for discussion purposes consider the attached schematic. If you are shorting across a resistor, then the voiltage drop across other elements in series with that resistor will get bigger, while the voltage drop across other resistors that are in parallel with the shorted resistor goes to 0. For example, if A is shorted then the voiltage across B & C increases to V_0. If B and/or C is shorted then the voltage drop across A goes to V_0 while the drop across B and C goes to 0. Is this what you had in mind?