ridicully | Apropos of nothing - a random HP thought.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.)

I knew the second I posted that comment that I had mentioned Einstein in reference to the wrong subject. :D

Anyway. I have to agree with

threeoranges here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/ridicully/148322.html?thread=208482#t208482): ultimately it's not just a case of Harry finding better "reference" material, it's that he's using that reference material uncredited and unreferenced, claiming it as his own (from Slughorn's point of view). That, at the very least, is plagiarism and last time I checked, plagiarism was one form of cheating. If I had used unreferenced material as the key parts of any of my work while I was at university and had been caught doing so, I would have been expelled; Harry doesn't get caught (as many university students don't), but that doesn't change that he's cheating.

But from what we can see in the books we're not talking about the kind of work that actually requires lots of referencing at all. And while I'm certainly no expert in the Scottish school system, I doubt the teachers expect All descriptions of the properties of ingredients taken from 'Ten thousand magical herbs and fungi'. Stirring technique described in 'Potions for dummies' at the end of all homework. For research projects in the upper years maybe, but not the day to day homework.
I might be completely wrong, but I think the teachers would just assume that the students used the available reference material for their homework. Of course I went to school in a completely different country, but I was never required to cite my reference material for basic homework. At uni it's of course different, but that's because 'homework' means something else there.

Not correcting Slughorn's conviction that he's a potions genius like his mother is certainly dishonest (if, like

threeoranges said, understandable), but not actually cheating.
(I've passed more than one exam by just being lucky when drawing the questions. But I certainly didn't correct the teachers' impressions that I knew what I was talking about *g*)

Well I guess that's what it comes down to: where one draws the line between Harry simply using something to his advantage to project an image of compentence and where he is outright cheating to maintain that deception in the face of his teacher, and obviously everyone's going to draw that line in a different place.

Yeah, it probably comes down to that.

And that, of course, depends on how much we believe Harry capable of actually *thinking* ;)

But that's a different debate.

I'll ditto your comment on dishonesty here

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But is wrong in this case really the same as cheating?

Especially since from what we see of the HBP's notes, they are more along the lines of technical impovements of the brewing process. Which apparently isn't something the average student can ever figure out, but only learn from the book or look up elsewhere.
From what we see, the only lesson where an actual understanding of the principles was required was the antidote lesson. And the book couldn't help Harry there - but then, no one but Hermione even understood what they were supposed to do.

Especially since from what we see of the HBP's notes, they are more along the lines of technical impovements of the brewing process. Which apparently isn't something the average student can ever figure out, but only learn from the book or look up elsewhere.

I thought it was all about "trial and error", myself. Potions seems to be a lesson where one learns through making mistakes and learning what not to do. Judging from the fact that Hermione hasn't been able to discover these technical improvements in any other book (had she done so, she'd have been able to keep up with Harry), it would appear that the HBP made all these notes as the result of his own efforts. He did the work, he experimented with strategic changes (probably as self-imposed homework).

Harry sailed to the top of the class on another person's efforts and, to do so, he had to pretend that he was someone who cared enough about Potions to do that extra work in his own time. Whichever way you slice it, it ain't right.

That said, I would be prepared to argue that Harry would not have been cheating had he spent his time memorizing the HBP's work and doing experiments outside of class to confirm the rightness of the notations. How is this not cheating, you ask? Simple: because Harry is spending his own time verifying the information and doing the actual physical experiments. He'd be spending his own time in experimentation and learning. That way, he'd have an arguably unfair advantage, but at least he'd be using those notes to ascertain for himself the basic principles of Potion-making. He'd be WORKING.

As it is, Harry just coasts and learns nothing whilst at the same time soaring to the top of the class by following, monkey-like, another person's detailed hard work. Don't ask me to believe that's not cheating :)

Don't ask me to believe that's not cheating :)
I won't ;) But I'm still not convinced myself.

I guess what it really comes down to is [as someone else said somewhere down the page], that from what we get to see of potions lessons in canon, it's a very weird subject and everyone has different ideas what it involves.
And depending on these ideas(and of course about a 1000 additional personal factors) he's either cheating or not.

For example I don't see potions as a trial and error lesson. They are supposed to get it right the first time by following their recipe. So a better recipe might make it easier, but shouldn't really make much of a difference.

I still see Harry not telling Slughorn that he had no idea what he was doing as wrong - but as you said before, it's an understandable reaction. And of course Slughorn *wants* it to be true. Otherwise he'd definitely have called Harry on the Bezoar trick.

I'm sorry to butt in on an ongoing conversation, but I've just arrived via The Daily Snitch. And part of what you said struck me oddly. First, if I may, personally, I view Harry receiving Snape's copy of the text as a simple matter. As far as I can understand (and I know it's been said before in this thread, please forgive me), Potions class is a bit like learning how to cook. You don't really ever learn why the yeast makes your dough rise or why the basil tastes good in this dish...it just does. Potions is much the same way. You don't ever learn (at least as far as we are led to believe) why the Bezoar stops the effects of most potions, nor why other ingredients affect certain potions the way the do. As far as the students know, they just do. Period. So, basically, he's only received an improved cookbook. I always thought of it, in terms of myself, as if I were baking from one of my mother's cookbooks wherein she had made notes that improved upon recipes. I would still present whatever it was I made from that cookbook as my own work because I was the one who cooked it.

I do understand that it was, at the least, dishonest and a little more than slightly low for Harry to fail to correct Slughorn's perception of him as a Potions whizz (although I think it's also been said that it's perfectly understandable).

That said, I would be prepared to argue that Harry would not have been cheating had he spent his time memorizing the HBP's work and doing experiments outside of class to confirm the rightness of the notations. How is this not cheating, you ask? Simple: because Harry is spending his own time verifying the information and doing the actual physical experiments. He'd be spending his own time in experimentation and learning. That way, he'd have an arguably unfair advantage, but at least he'd be using those notes to ascertain for himself the basic principles of Potion-making. He'd be WORKING.

And this is where I have to sit back and think because, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Harry indeed take the steps to verify that the instructions worked? When the notations said to "crush [the roots] with flat side of silver dagger, releases juice better than cutting." (p. 189, Scholastic edition), Harry tried it. And it worked. And, if I recall properly, he did test every notation in the book, though more than most of the experimentation was done in class. Not trying to be snarky, but honestly curious - how then does that not meet the qualification of "working" or "not using his own time in experimentation and learning"?

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threeoranges.livejournal.com - 2005-08-24 20:14 (UTC) - Expand

How is a textbook with a few annotations doing 'all the work' for Harry. Doesn't he still have to do research and write essays and actually brew the potions? The textbook can't do that for him. Yes, Slughorn thinks that Harry came up with the alterations of the potions himself, but the fact is that Harry brewed them. He had to actually have enough Potions skills to accomplish that. And the gal of Potions class is that the students can brew the potions they need themselves. Harry achieves that, as does Hermione.

Also, Hermione on occasion does Potions homework for Ron and Harry and then they put their name on them. Because they didn't understand or were too lazy. The right thing would be to let them do it themselves even if that meant a bad grade.

How is a textbook with a few annotations doing 'all the work' for Harry. Doesn't he still have to do research and write essays and actually brew the potions?

Because everyone else in the class has to learn by "trial and error" when it comes to brewing the potions, and by doing research when writing the essays. Harry does not have to do the "messy first attempt" (by which one learns what not to do) when brewing, nor does he have to pore over books in the library. He's getting fed the answers, and he doesn't even cite the source in his essays. That, as I said earlier, is called plagiarism. It's cheating.

Also, Hermione on occasion does Potions homework for Ron and Harry and then they put their name on them. Because they didn't understand or were too lazy. The right thing would be to let them do it themselves even if that meant a bad grade.

I agree, that was cheating too. I don't approve of that, and it sounds like you're not too impressed with it either. It's quite natural that Hermione "doesn't mind" when she does their work (as long as she's still top of the class), but resents it when Harry starts looking better than she does by cheating off someone else :) Even so, Harry should do his own work, full-stop.

Let's say that instead of Potions, this was an Algebra class and instead of making potions, they're solving word problems. Now, the book gives Harry specific steps to take toward answering the math problem. They are complicated and long. The Half-Blood Prince has made notes in the book that provide a different way of solving the same problem. The alternate instructions are also complicated and long, but they work better for Harry than the instructions provided by Macmillan/McGraw Hill. Harry uses the Prince's alternate math formula, and finishes his word problem first. How is this cheating? And if it's not cheating, then how is it different than Harry following the suggestions noted in the book when it comes to how to chop ingredients?

IIRC, the notes in the book all deal with procedural aspects of potion-making: how to stir, the best way to skin a shrivel fig, etc. If Harry needs to write essays about the theoretical or alchemical aspects of potion-making, he's still going to have to find that information for himself.

In fact, I would argue that part of why Harry's doing so much better in Potions is that because he finds the Half-Blood Prince so interesting, he's actually reading his textbook outside of class for a change. Snape makes studying fun!

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threeoranges.livejournal.com - 2005-08-21 22:05 (UTC) - Expand

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is-peoples.livejournal.com - 2005-08-21 23:34 (UTC) - Expand