Wrong Voyager

So in my Astronomy class I was talking about the Voyager spacecraft, and how they were launched in the 70's, are 100 A.U. out, and so forth, and one of my students starts shaking her head, saying "I don't understand why people would do that." I thought she was complaining about the cost of space exploration, which I didn't want to get into....

But no. What she couldn't understand was how people would spend their entire life on some spacecraft on a one-way trip. Yup, she thought the Voyager missions were manned missions. I couldn't help laughing; I told her she was probably thinking of Star Trek:Voyager. :)

It's amazing what these students don't know about astronomy, sometimes. Apparently, this student didn't know that no human has been farther from Earth than the Moon. Another student thought that the stars were all rocky like Earth. I had to carefully explain to another that Kepler didn't in fact discover the ellipse, he just discovered that planetary orbits were elliptical. I always have to be careful not to assume very much about what they know or don't know.

Maybe I ought to post my quizzes up here and see how well y'all do on them, for a baseline? :)

Astronomy Quizzes #1 and #2

OK, here are the last two quizzes I gave my astronomy class (they get a quiz every Friday).

( Quiz #1 )

After this quiz (on which they had a class average of 1.7 out of 4), I decided that my multiple choice quizzes tend to kick my classes' butts, so I switched to a short-answer format. It helped; the average score of the following was 2.8.

( Quiz #2 )

Edit: Answers posted in the comments; huzzah!