Hogwarts Graduation

[GulPlum]

No: HPFGUIDX 37586

"finwitch" <finwitch at y...> wrote:

<snip>

> Quite interesting... but Hogwarts might have a tradition that's 
> different. Such as a special ceremony including only those 
recieving 
> their NEWT-results, their families and teachers. This would include 
a 
> few speeches, perhaps music and public recieving of their 
certificate 
> and possible scholarships. Formal dress-robes. And certainly a 
little 
> bit of magic. After all, there isn't any university. Hogwarts is 
the 
> highest education in Wizard World.

Quite. However, everything we know about final exams indicates that 
the results aren't announced immediately, so they won't know who's 
got what, and there certainly wouldn't be any certificate 
distribution. *All* seventh-years will be taking NEWTs (that's the 
whole point). As I said previously, the most which might be organised 
is an "end of exams" gig - in real life schools, it's not unheard of 
for the school to arrange something (though extremely rare), but far 
more likely would be for the pupils to do something themselves (which 
is very frequent - this is also usually the first time most 
otherwise "normal" English kids experience excessive drinking and the 
concommitant hangover). This might include some input from the school 
authorities (and perhaps popular teachers might be invited), but the 
event would be mega-informal.  

What I would expect to happen is that each House's seventh-years 
would make arrangements with the House master to get food and goodies 
from the school kitchens and take over the common room for the night. 
Alternatively, they just take over Hogsmeade. ;-)

I do appreciate that for Americans and most Europeans, for whom it's 
immediately obvious who's passed what exams, all of this appears 
somewhat strange, but it's the way things are. As JKR's own education 
was in the English system, it would be most likely that as with most 
things, she used that as a model for Hogwarts (and everything appears 
to point that way).

I do have a small nit-pick which is that there can't be many people 
taking OWLs and NEWTs in the UK every year (unlike real-world GCSEs 
and A Levels) and thus I can't see why results can't be announced 
immediately. After all, it's unlikely that there's an external 
examining body, and it seems as though the Hogwarts teachers 
themselves set and mark the exams. JKR has seems to have become just 
a little *too* bogged down in the real-world system and has failed to 
appreciate that things at Hogwarts must be just a little different.