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

[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.)

[grrliz.livejournal.com]

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.

[ridicully]

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*)

[grrliz.livejournal.com]

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.

[ridicully]

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.

[conuly]

I'll ditto your comment on dishonesty here

[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.