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

[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.