On the positive side, though, is that out of 46 students who handed in the total of 16 written assignments each this semester, only one student tried to plagiarize on a single assignment. And this was a student who missed most of the course. Everybody else struggled with the material honestly and without Googling anything.

Thirty-nine out of 46 students did quite well. I think this is a very good result for an intensive summer course where we cover the material of 15 weeks in 5.

And the biggest prize of the year goes to:

In 711 Muslims invaded the Iberian Peninsula and soon conquered most of Latin America. They subjected the tribes that lived there before (Visigoths, Aztecs and Incas) and established a culture of tolerance. Everybody in Europe became every interested in what was going on in medieval Latin America in terms of knowledge. The King Alfonso X created the best school of translation in the Latin American (Spanish) city of Toledo.

I left this one for last because I knew I would find something like this there. It goes on like this for pages. Not a glimmer of a realization that Latin America and Spain might be different places ever appears in those pages.

I’m definitely due for a break from teaching.

From another final exam:

The Inquisition was the Muslims’ way to police each other and punish everybody who didn’t practice Islam correctly. It was established by the Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabel. They forced masses of Jews to convert to Islam and those who refused were kicked out of Spain.

. . . that is doing well in terms of democracy, culture, women’s rights and gay rights is Spain,” I learned from a student’s final exam.