O O O It's Magic (More Wombat Love)

[Neri]

No: HPFGUIDX 159385

> Potioncat:
> 
> My first reaction was "This is a simple explanation?"
> 
> and my second reaction was "C'mom---we're talking about Maths!
Rowling 
> here. <bg> (that does mean big grin, doesn't it?)
> 
> I didn't take the Wombats. I would have had to be carried out like 
> what's her name in O.W.L.s if I had. My question(s) to the group 
is, 
> why do you think she creates these tests. Did she create these 
tests? 
> Have they generated, whether by intention or not, any new canon or 
> clues?


Neri:
Maybe I didn't explain this very well


JKR's grading system is simple enough, I believe: A good answer gets 
high score, a bad answer gets low score, and medium answer gets a 
medium score. You don't need to be a math genius for that. I trust 
even JKR can manage it. She was a teacher once, wasn't she?

The fact that her grading system is simple enough doesn't mean that 
it will be simple for *us* to reverse-engineer it. This, as I tried 
to demonstrate in my post upthread, will probably be *very* 
complicated. But there's no contradiction here. The grading system 
can be very simple, and yet it would be very difficult to reveal what 
it was just from the final grades.

The thing is – we're all dying here for some new canon details: does 
the Ministry consider the dementors or the inferi more dangerous????? 
We want *definite answers* for questions like this one. But JKR 
apparently hasn't realized that. She just put together a very simple 
exam for us to test our understanding of the WW. Dementors and inferi 
are both very reasonable answers showing good understanding of the 
WW, so JKR gives them both high score. For what she's trying to do it 
makes sense. It's actually a much more reliable grading method than 
giving only one answer the maximum grade and zero for all the others. 
In fact I'd recommend using JKR's grading method to any teacher 
around. The problem here is only with us. *We* don't care much if we 
received O or A or E in the darn WOMBAT. We want to know if it's 
dementors or inferi that the Ministry considers most dangerous, 
because for some reason we're sure it's the key to all the mysteries 
in the series. Well, tough luck for us. JKR wasn't distributing new 
canon here.


Neri