Beat: I caught one of my students plagiarizing

[Coffee]

So...I'm teaching a Spanish class this summer, and I assigned a project to my students that they had to write, in either English or Spanish, about a day that bears historical significance in a Spanish-speaking country.

Most of them Dia de los Muertos, one did the day that Hidalgo called for revolution in Mexico(September 16), and a few did Cinco de Mayo.

My best student did a paper on Cinco de Mayo that was verbatim from the Wiki entry on Cinco de Mayo, both the English and Spanish versions. She is far and away the best student in class, with something like a 97 average prior to this little stunt. Now, she has to rewrite it all tonight for a maximum of an 80...and it counts 20% of her final grade.

Brag: All my kids are achievers with few discipline problems.
Beat: Caught my best student plagiarizing her major project
Beat: Now I have to go back and make sure no one else was cheating
Variance: The papers that were worse actually draw less suspicion, because no reliable resource would commit some of the atrocities of grammar I've seen.