Apropos of nothing - a random HP thought.

[ridicully]

Where does half the fandom get the impression that Harry is cheating by using a book with notes in it?

They are allowed to use their book while brewing and are supposed to have read up on the potion they are preparing in class.
And in written tests, I doubt they are allowed to use their books anyway, so the notes won't be any help to him there.
The only difference I see between Harry and a Ravenclaw (in this instance) is that the Ravenclaw would have made the notes himself - and probably not in the book, but on a spare bit of paper.

Having better reference material is rarely considered cheating. No matter how much of an advantage it gives you.

Comments

[juju-bean.livejournal.com]

It's cheating. Harry is benefitting off of someone else's work. He put no thought or effort into his potions, preferring to take the easy way out. They're graded on each potion they make, so it's just like using someone else's notes during a test.

[littlemousling]

Have to agree. It's not quite like reading the Sparknotes instead of the book, but it's very close. There's a reason he had to keep the profs from finding out about it.

[conuly]

He didn't have to. He just chose not to, because he bought into the same idea Hermione did, that it wasn't appropriate to use material that wasn't printed officially, and that the point of a class is to be better than other people. That's nonsense. The point of a class is to learn, which is exactly what he did, and exactly what Hermione could've done if she hadn't been so closed-minded.

Except for Snape. He did have to hide it from Snape - but that was because of the fact that 1. Snape hates him and would use any excuse to confiscate the helpful book and 2. he'd learned some dark Jinxes from the book, which he wouldn't want to admit to having done.

[conuly]

But if he'd read from the book with no notes in it, he would've been benefiting from somebody else's work - the author's.

The point of a class is to learn. That's what he did. He read the book, read the notes, and learned stuff.

Everything else is totally irrelevant, up to and including grades.

[grrliz.livejournal.com]

But if he'd read from the book with no notes in it, he would've been benefiting from somebody else's work - the author's.

Education exists on the basic premise that at some point the teacher is going to have to give the student a basic level of knowledge on which to develop and form new ideas, and that is exactly what a textbook does. With a standard, run of the mill Potions textbook, everyone else in the class comes from that same level of foreknowledge: they're expected to be given some information and to base their learning upon this information. Harry lucks out and gets a book loaded not just with clarifications of instructions or other ephemera, but actual substantial improvements to what is written in the text and he uses this information to his own advantage without having to go to the effort of making those connections himself.

It reminds me of this line in Jurassic Park (something I never thought I'd compare to Potterverse, but there's a first time for everything):

I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Er, except Harry isn't selling lunchboxes, but I hope you see what I'm getting at. Harry is lacking the same discipline as the scientists at Jurassic Park: he thinks he thinks he's lucked out but he's been dealt a raw hand.

[conuly]

So, what if he'd asked Hermione for help? And Hermione had helped him? What if he asked the teacher for help, and gotten assistance?

From what I know of the class, very little of it seems focused on why potions are made the way they are - if that were the case, the improvements would already have been known throughout the wizarding world, wouldn't they? Instead, it's Hermione's idea - read the book, do what it says, even when the evidence shows that the book is patently wrong in areas.

So if he gets a better textbook than everyone else, that's not cheating. That's just learning the same way everyone else is, but with a better cookbook.

[juju-bean.livejournal.com]

Ah, but it wasn't a better textbook, it was a marked up old book. It's pretty much like taking someone's old notes and using them for your own gain. Which wouldn't be a bad thing if you were just using them to build on what you already know or understand (like to clarify a point or something), but Harry was using it in place of having to use his own brain.

But if he'd read from the book with no notes in it, he would've been benefiting from somebody else's work - the author's.

Everyone has the same textbook and that puts them on an initial equal footing. It's what you do with it that makes you a good student or not. Neville and Hermione have the same textbook for five years, yet they each end up with different results. Hermione succeeds and Neville fails. If they're both using the exact same textbook, then obviously Hermione is doing something that Neville isn't.

It might all be a matter of interpretation. But in this case, Hermione is interpreting it on her own, and Harry is using someone else's hard work instead of doing his own.

[conuly]

Everyone has the same textbook and that puts them on an initial equal footing.

But despite what Hermione thinks, the point of a class is not to have a contest. It's not to have everyone start out equal. It's to learn. That's exactly what Harry did. He learned how to make potions. He learned the better way to make certain potions. He learned how to save Ron's life. That's what class is for.

[ryf.livejournal.com]

the point of a class is not to have a contest. It's not to have everyone start out equal. It's to learn.

Exactly.

He learned how to make potions.

I'd even argue that he actually knew beforehand, because those 'new ways at making certain potions' were also not very easy. They just got better results. So he must have learned a lot in Snape's class.

[grrliz.livejournal.com]

So, what if he'd asked Hermione for help? And Hermione had helped him? What if he asked the teacher for help, and gotten assistance?

You seem to be arguing that all forms of help are cheating or rather that Harry's brand of "help" is not cheating since asking Hermione or Slughorn would not be considered cheating either. But there are fine disctinctions to be made (not unlike in potions), and we can even use Hermione as an example. Hermione will assist Neville in class (which seems to get opposite reactions from Snape; sometimes he gets mad if she helps him, sometimes he gets mad if she doesn't help him) but won't do the work for him, and I would hardly consider this cheating. In other instances, when she gets frustrated with Ron's and Harry's approach to schoolwork she will actually finish their essays and what not for them, which is cheating. It's the difference between having someone assist you while you try to figure out your problem and having someone come in and hand you a readymade answer to the same problem.

To put it more obviously: if I lucked out with a Chemistry textbook annotated by Albert Einstein and then proceeded to pass his work off verbatim as my own, would that seem fair?

[ridicully]

if I lucked out with a Chemistry textbook annotated by Albert Einstein and then proceeded to pass his work off verbatim as my own, would that seem fair?

Considering what I've seen of Einsteins handwriting, I'd say you'd deserve any praise you'd get. *g*

But seriously, in a practical exam annotations can only help you this far in my opinion. And I don't see much difference between Hermione whispering to Neville that he has to add the eye of newt now and the HBP telling Harry that toe of frog works better if it's sliced not chopped.

And what we've seen of the potions homework didn't seem like the kind of essays to me that would require you to understand the principles involved - actually Hermione specifically mentions it as something unusual for potions lessons during the antidote lesson - but rather just recounting facts. So unless the HBP had written whole essays in the margins of his book that Harry could copy verbatim, he still had to do most of the work and just had better reference material when it comes to the details. Unfair maybe, but not cheating.

(And for the record, I don't know if I would want to trust a theoretic physicists notes on chemistry.)

[conuly]

Hermione did essentially do Neville's work for him, she flat-out told him how to correct his mistakes, she didn't tell him how to understand how to correct his mistakes.

You seem to think that the point of a class is to get a grade. I disagree. If the point of a class is to learn, then it doesn't matter how you're learning or from whom. All that matters is that you learn. The grades are completely and totally irrelevant.

[ryf.livejournal.com]

if I lucked out with a Chemistry textbook annotated by Albert Einstein and then proceeded to pass his work off verbatim as my own, would that seem fair?

It would be Physics, as you were already informed, but as it stands, I not sure I would call it cheating. Especially since even Einstein can only help you understand and help you make your homework, but he won't have the exact answer to every question your teacher/prof can pose.

But the point for me is that in Potions, every student has a book which has a working recipe for the potion they are supposed to brew in it. If they did things correctly, the others would have made potions that were at least not a lot worse than Harry's. They could have. But nost messed up. The cookbook analogy is quite right when it comes to that class: it's all about adding stuff at the right time and concentrating. Harry still had to do that. The annotations didn't help him prepare ingrediants or tell him 'NOW' when 10 minutes had passed. He had to do that thinking, he had to apply the tips. It made the results better, but as I read the book, it still wasn't any easier than preparing the potion without the annotations.

So if my Einstein annotations helped me in Physics, but people who didn't have them could still get the same grade and no teacher even bothers to look at what is written in textbooks, why call it cheating?

I don't understand why Harry didn't copy the annotations for Ron, though. They could have helped him, maybe.

And one further thing to the Einstein analogy: I'm sorry, but it lacks. Because in Physics and Chemistry, you have to actually understand and if questioned, I doubt a few notes would help you explain what you just read. You need to understand, not just copy. And as I see it, Potions isn't about understanding, but about memorising how to do things when you need to. I can memorise that NaOH + HCl -> H2O + NaCl , I can even write it down on a piece of paper and cheat on an exam, but in order to pass Chemistry with a high grade or in an oral exam, I need to understand why it does that. And that's not something that can come from a few words of annotations of a textbook, but from thinking and careful reading.

[threeoranges.livejournal.com]

What a brilliant comparison with JURASSIC PARK!

I can see why people are stating that it's not cheating: in one sense, Harry's using the HBP's textbook is equivalent to Harry's having found another textbook, a better one, and using that instead of the standard one. The argument goes, how can Harry be accused of cheating for having the good fortune to find a "better", more thorough text from which to work? If you or I were researching the Great Depression and we found a better book in the library than the standard one issued to us by our teachers, would it be cheating to use that instead?

Answer: of course not, but the reason why it's not cheating is that the book in question has been published and its conclusions are the recognized intellectual property of a particular author. All the student would have to do to stay perfectly legal/moral is to use its conclusions and cite the author and the work in the essay credits. This would demonstrate that the student took the time to do extra research and had shown discrimination in their choice of which information to use.

None of this can be applied to Harry. He didn't work to acquire the extra learning, it just fell into his lap. He didn't show any discrimination in what he used, he just followed the HBP's annotations blindly. Furthermore, he didn't cite the HBP in his Potions essay notes, he pretended the HBP's conclusions were his own. That's plagiarism.

I can certainly understand why Harry succumbed to the temptation of using the book: Slughorn's touching belief that he must have inherited Lily's talents would make Harry especially reluctant to say "Actually, I'm just copying this person's conclusions".

It's still cheating, though.

[ridicully]

But as far as Harry is concerned, he is just getting a bit of help from one of his peers. Or at least just another schoolboy like himself.
Same as Neville after being tutored by Hermione just follows her instructions.
And while it is definitely lazy and most people would see not setting Slughorn right about him not actually being a potions genius as wrong, I still can't see how it is cheating.

[threeoranges.livejournal.com]

But there's a world of difference between someone guiding you through problems until you figure out how to do it yourself (as Hermione undoubtedly would do with Neville) and someone doing all your work for you and your putting your name to that other person's work :)

Like I said, I don't blame Harry for doing it, the temptation was overwhelming (and came upon him before he even knew it had happened) but it was still wrong.

[gershwhen.livejournal.com]

I don't get this. Potions is basically cooking -- you follow the rules and it comes out. If the book helps, that's not cheating. And he ISN'T using the book during a test or using a spell to write the information on his arm. He has a reference and refers to it.

Plus, if Snape actually explained and taugh, instead of degraded, perhaps the information would have been imparted directly?

[juju-bean.livejournal.com]

Snape grades the potions they make in class. Same as a quiz.

And if Snape didn't teach or explain anything, I don't think anyone would've made it as far as they have. Everyone would've failed their OWLS. Harry had to learn something from him to be able to make it into sixth year potions.

[ryf.livejournal.com]

I am taking an Inorganic Chemistry lab course at the moment. I am graded for what I do there. If I had a friend who majors in Chemistry who helps me before every class and I then say what he told me when questioned, is that cheating? No, because that's how school/uni works. If you have friends who can help you, that's not cheating at all.

[grrliz.livejournal.com]

There is a fine difference that threeoranges pointed out above: your friend is (presumably) guiding you through your chem lab difficulties and trying to help you understand it (as Hermione might), he's not doing your homework for you and at the end of the day you take credit for it (as Harry does with the textbook).

[ryf.livejournal.com]

It's only one textbooks with maybe a few sentences of notes on each page. How exactly can this do every homework for him? It doesn't have the answers for every assignment written out, he still has to research parts and he has to actually write the assignments. It makes it easier, but that's not forbidden and not cheating. ItÄs just letting someone or something help you with pointing out where to start.

and at the end of the day you take credit for it

Atb the end of the day, I only got 63/90 points in Physics because my boyfriend studies it and helped me with every assignment (which weren't graded, I'll grant that, but he also would have helped if they were graded) and every topic. I sort of took credit for his work. It's the way it works. Also, at school people pay money so that other students help them with homework and preparing for tests. Not everyone can afford that and still it's not teaching. If I found a good way to learn math formulas, wrote it down and passed it to someone else, would that be cheating?

As I said, elsewhere, Potions isn't about understanding things, it's about memorising how to put things together and basic stuff like weighing and stiring. The outcome is important, not how you achieve it and if Harry didn't already have the skills to do a decent potion, he would have never been successful even with the book.

[ryf.livejournal.com]

And if Snape didn't teach or explain anything, I don't think anyone would've made it as far as they have.

Thing is, he never explains how Potions work. Just like it is of course never explained how magic works. They are just in this class to stir things and learn 'recipes' inside out, so they can do that without Snape's supervision. While that is probably the dumbest class concept I have ever seen, it also means that it is totally okay to apply what he learned from the book, because that does the same thing. Only telling what to do, not why.

[ridicully]

But he still has to brew the potions himself. If he just had to tap the book twice and his cauldron would be filled I might agree with you, be he is still doing the work he is supposed to do in the class, which is following the instructions and brewing a potion while.

Where is the difference from missing one lesson or making his notes unreadable by spilling tea all over them and then copying Hermione's notes so he can work?

I won't deny you can argue that it might be morally not quite right, but I can't see how he can be accused of actually cheating.

(For example, I've chosen not to attend one of my lectures at all in the whole year. For the exam I'm preparing by the book. I know of others who prepare with notes of people who actually attended the lectures. Nonetheless, none of us are cheating.
Even though we are benefiting of someone else doing most of the work.)

[ryf.livejournal.com]

(For example, I've chosen not to attend one of my lectures at all in the whole year. For the exam I'm preparing by the book. I know of others who prepare with notes of people who actually attended the lectures. Nonetheless, none of us are cheating.

Good example. Also, I hope that in his NEWT exams, they would actually just give him a sheet of paper with Potions names and he would have to brew them from memeory. Or check the book beforehand. Everything else would be acreless on part of the teachers.

[ryf.livejournal.com]

The other students all have a book with a working recipe. As does Harry. If he didn't follow that directions and meessed up, he would have gotten a low grade, too. He didn't and a lot of the other students messed up although they had 'good' instructions that would have resulted in an at least decent potion.

They had the same chance.