Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Had the second quiz for my astronomy classes this morning. I got to school at around 820am and was able to have the questions photocopied by 930am.

There were seven questions, only the first of which required them to recall details from the movie, and not even names or places or acronyms at that, but events that they can't help but notice if they paid attention to the story.

The rest of the questions were more or less about their opinion, and also showed my bias with regards to the movie. And I'm looking forward to determining who did and didn't really watch the movie based on how they try to bluff their way through these questions.

The questions, by the way, were taken from the reaction paper supplements I've been requiring them the past few terms.

Having recently had a website called to my attention that provides students with term papers (and movie reviews - and there are enough easily accessible out there on several discussion sites), I decided that if I were to ask the students to make a reaction paper about the movie, it would be in the classroom, and get rid of the temptation to copy and paste something from the internet.

The supplementary questions were supposedly to make sure they at least provide some content of the paper from their own fingertips, but it did not prevent some students from passing a two-page review that ignored my questions whatsoever. I gave them low grades for those, but they didn't find out until the pre-final standing were computed, and the lesson learned a little too late to be applied to my class.

I guess the temptation was too great for some to pass off others' work copied-and-pasted from the web as their own because the paper is "typed" out on a computer after all. Maybe it wouldn't deter them anyway if I asked it to be typewritten or handwritten. I could imagine someone just copying something off some homepage onto paper rather than think for themselves.

Another justification: students who take the time to download transcripts and movie synopses (regardless of whether they watched the film) already have an unfair advantage over those who just watched the movie, which is the minimum requirement anyway. If I asked them about facts from the movie that you can't get from one sitting, I'm favoring the industrious researchers.

Not that digging deeper is bad, just that that's not what I expected in the first place. Besides the movie is supposed to make them think. If they missed that just because it was an "assignment" that's their problem.

I'll continue this discussion tomorrow.