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

[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