Academic dishonesty

[delwynmarch]

No: HPFGUIDX 139406

Matt wrote:
"Perhaps a lab report would explain the source for unconventional
methods used in the experiment, but the potions exercises don't call
for a report; they are purely practical.  As I said in the prior post,
it does bother me a bit that Harry doesn't disabuse Slughorn of the
misconception that his potionmaking is intuitive, but what is being
taught is the ability to successfully make the potion, not intuition."

Del replies:
What is being taught is the ability to successfully make a potion
*according to a certain protocol*. Simply having the students make
potions would be a waste of time and resources. Though the potions are
what is used to grade the students, they are not what really matters.
What matters is how good of a potion can the students make while
following a particular method. It's the *skill* the students develop
and demonstrate that matters, their ability to produce a certain
result under certain circumstances - including the method they are
given. So using another method makes the whole exercise worthless. 

Slughorn asked his students to turn to page X and to prepare Potion Y.
The point wasn't to try and find a way to circumvent the protocol. The
point was to see how good a Potion Y the students were able to do
while following that particular protocol. If they skipped the
designated protocol and jumped straight to a better one, then there
would be no point at all in grading them.

Let me compare this to the first DADA lesson. In that lesson, they
worked on practicing silent magic. They didn't learn any new spell,
they just had to practice those spells silently. Did it work? No, for
most of them. Would it have been more efficient if they had used the
spells out loud? Of course! But that wasn't the point. The point was
to see how well they could do silently. It wasn't the results that
mattered, it was the skill that was being developed, even though that
skill was demonstrated by the results.

Matt wrote:
"It's that last point that I actually find most provocative in
thinking about Harry's use of the HBP book.  Do the "talented"
potionmakers in the class actually understand what they are doing, or
are they simply following instructions?  Does Harry -- presented with
the contrast between the textbook instructions and Snape's --
understand things any better than the rest of the class, or is he,
too, simply following instructions?  I'm not a scientist, but I am a
cook, and I tend to assume that there is some talent, some feel, some
art involved in potionmaking, as there is in cooking, but I fear that
none of the students we see has really picked this up.  (Certainly not
Hermione, who insists on slavishly following the recipe.)  One would
think the concept would be attractive to Harry, who tends to perform
much better at instinctive/reactive tasks (flying, sports, duelling)
than at book learning. "

Del replies:
Your use of the word "slavishly" to describe Hermione indicates to me
that you missed the entire point of the Potions lessons. That point
was to teach the kids precisely what you've just described: how
potion-making works. The ultimate point was *not* to have them make
perfect potions, even though that was what they were graded on. It was
to have the kids understand the interactions between the different
ingredients and the different moves.

By following the book's instructions precisely, Hermione worked on
doing exactly that. She studied the theory on one hand, and she
applied it on the other hand, thus learning the innards of
potion-making. The fact that she is indeed learning the art of
potion-making is demonstrated during the antidote lesson. She appears
to be the only one who actually knows what she's doing, and that's
because she understands the principles of potion-making.

Harry, on the other hand, doesn't understand anything to
potion-making. He's just following another book's instructions, but he
doesn't gather anything from it. And when the antidote lesson comes,
he is completely at a loss, because he doesn't understand anything.

You say you like to cook. So let me explain that in cooking terms.

let's say the kids have this sauce to make. The original recipe tells
them to use yellow onions, sour cream and two different kinds of
herbs, and to cook the sauce at high temperature for a short time.
Hermione has already studied the properties of each of the ingredients
used, and she's about to learn and remember what happens when you mix
them and when you cook them in a certain way. Harry, on the other
hand, has this alternate recipe that tells him to use white onions and
to add butter and a third herb, and to cook the sauce on low
temperature first before turning the temp to high. As a result, he
gets a much creamier and tastier sauce than Hermione. But the problem
is that he doesn't know *why*. He can't identify the different
ingredients when tasting the two sauces, and so can't appreciate how
the alternate and additional ingredients come into play. He also
doesn't understand what cooking does to a sauce, and so is unable to
appreciate why his own cooking was better than Hermione's. So now let
me ask you: who do you think is the better student? Harry's sauce
might be better, but it's Hermione's knowledge that has progressed.

About rewarding creativity, now. Slughorn doesn't reward Harry's
creativity for itself: he rewards it because it worked! When Ernie
tried to create his own original potion, Slughorn did *not*
congratulate him for trying, and he didn't discuss things over with
Ernie, to help him figure out what went wrong. So it's not the
creativity in itself that Slughorn is after. What he's rewarding is
the fact that Harry supposedly took a bet and won. What he thinks
happened is that Harry thought "hum! I think if I do this or that, the
potion might come off better", and he dared trying it even though that
could ruin the potion entirely. But that's not at all what happened.
When Harry decided to try the HBP corrections, it's because his potion
was not doing well already. It was *not* a case of getting a passable
potion by following the official instructions or trying to get a
better potion by following the modifications at the risk of ruining
the potion altogether. It was not a bet, Harry did not take any risk
because his potions were not going to be wonderful anyway. I can
accept that Harry took a small risk the first time or two times he
tried the HBP modifications, but after that it wasn't a risk anymore.
And yet he kept being praised as though he had taken a risk and won
his bet.

Added to the fact that he never once understood *why* the
modifications made the potions better (he couldn't, since he didn't
even understand what was supposed to go on in the original method!),
that does leave me pretty disgusted at the way he kept using the HBP
ameliorations to get great grades. It was dishonest. He knew he didn't
understand anything to potion-making, so he should have stuck to the
original method, so that he could be fairly graded against his
classmates. Using better recipes with the *only* intention of fooling
his teacher and getting praises and great grades was deliberate cheating.

JMO, of course.

Del