At least cookies may have saved my life...my physics class manipulated me into providing milk, juice, and cookies during the final exam today. From the looks on their faces during the exam, the cookies may have been the only thing keeping them from going for my throat. As one of the students left, he mumbled something about "suffering" and hoping that he wouldn't "find any helpless kittens on the way home." Egads.

I had an entertaining and frustrating time reading essays from my astronomy classes. Some of them were really well done: factually correct, well-written, creative. Some of the students did not bother to even run a spell-check; those papers took awhile to grade. I chose to randomly type phrases from the essays into Google to see if any cheating had occurred - 7 out of 90 papers (about 8%) had taken material word-for-word without appropriate citation. Five papers were not malicious, in my opinion. There was enough original work to show me that this was more likely poor paper-writing preparation than intentional cheating. The sixth paper had about 3 sentences of original work. The seventh paper had not a single original sentence, but rather verbatim paragraphs from a few different sources. I should note that this is the same student who criticized my writing skills, overestimated his appeal, and asked me to write a letter of recommendation to a Christian college that uses morals and ethics as a one of its determining factors for admission.

This was the first time I added a formal writing component, albeit a small one, to the astronomy courses. I think I'll continue to do so, to make the students look more into aspects of astronomy we don't really cover in detail during class. After all, as one of my students wrote in his essay, "the pursuit of knowledge...should not have limits on its boundaries."

:)