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

[is-peoples.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think that the root cause of disagreement is that we have different ideas about what Potions is all about. It's not a very well-defined class in canon. To borrow from my previous analogy, maybe it would be better to say that Harry's the only one who got the correct answer to the word problem because he was using the old math formulas that he found in his book, while everyone else was trying to puzzle out the new math solution to the problem. Which still isn't cheating, but is an unfair advantage. And I see it more akin to notes in a math book than notes in a lit book partly because of the "follow the recipe" format of the classes we've seen and partially because math was my very least favorite class, so that's the analogy that's stuck in my head. But anyway, I agree that the lit class scenerio is cheating, but I'm not sure that it applies to Potions.

If Snape makes studying so much fun, why don't the kids he's been teaching for five years already know the best way to chop ingredients, skin a shrivelfig, etc? ;) It seems to me entirely typical of Snape that he wants to keep his superior knowledge all to himself, hidden away in his own textbook, leaving his students to study from the most basic recipes so that he can shout at them when they screw up out of ignorance. (No, I don't believe he's a vile murderer :) but I do believe he's a petty piece of work...)

Oh heavens, yes. Snape is a dreadful teacher who shouldn't be allowed to talk to children, let alone try to impart knowledge to them. I was talking about the SnapeChild who wrote in the textbook making studying fun, mostly because I enjoy the irony of some old notes of Snape's teaching a student more than Snape himself probably ever has as a teacher. I also wonder how, with teachers like Snape and Hagrid and Trelawney and at least half of the DADA teachers, Hogwarts manages to turn out any students who are equipped for the real world.