Academic dishonesty.

[eggplant107]

No: HPFGUIDX 139436

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

> Simply having the students make potions
> would be a waste of time and resources.

I must disagree, I think rigidly forcing students to follow exact
instructions even though they have found a much better procedure would
be a waste of time and resources. In our world a good chemistry
professor would praise a student to high heaven who went to the
library and found a little known method to perform an experiment that
was superior to the one given in the textbook. I just find it very
hard to believe that in the wizard world things would be different and
the entire point of the class was to see how well students can blindly
follow stupid and incompetent instructions; let's face it, the
standard Advanced Potions book just isn't very good.  And wasn't there
a scene where Slughorn praised a student for adding a bit of
peppermint even though it was unconventional?

> the fact that he [Harry] never once 
> understood *why* the modifications 
> made the potions better 

That appears to be true, but I have seen little evidence that any of
the students, Hermione included, have much understanding why potions
work as they do; certainly just following the crummy instructions in
the standard textbook won't enlighten them.  

> that does leave me pretty disgusted 
> at the way he kept using the HBP 

Even if you disagree with my take on it, "pretty disgusted" seems like
very strong language to me, especially compared with the monstrous
evil we've seen in this and other Potter books. It just seems like
very small potatoes, and I think we hold Harry to an impossibly high
moral standard and never give the poor boy an inch of slack; with
other characters, especially Snape, we make the opposite mistake.  

Eggplant