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]

Yeah, I am wondering this, too. However, I don't think it's fair that he doesn't help his friends with his book. He seems to want the knowledge for himself and only he gets the really good marks.

Streber :)

[incitata.livejournal.com]

Definately not cheating but then the HP fandom has some very strange ideas.

[schnurble.livejournal.com]

This bugged me too.
When I studied, we were allowed to use our notes in some of the exams, and no one considered it cheating when one used a copy of the notes of someone else, because their own notes were not usable (or simply not existent).

Only thing I would admonish is that Harry didn't share the notes with Ron (I wouldn't have shared with know-it-all Hermione, but Ron is his best friend and can use some extra help)

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

They're probably getting this idea from Hermione, stickler that she is.

[conuly]

That's not true. He offered to let them read it, but Ron couldn't read Snape's handwriting, and Hermione refused to flat-out.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I have no idea where they get that idea. It bothered me all through the book that Hermione kept accusing him of cheating!

(Of course Rowling called it that through Hermione Sue and if she said the sky was purple and green and anti-freeze was soda pop, there'd be a lot of dead people in this fandom the next day.)

[conuly]

He tried to. Ron couldn't read the notes. Hermione refused ot.

[marksykins.livejournal.com]

But he says that Ron can't read the handwriting as well as he can, and the only reason he doesn't pass it onto him is because he can't be whispering instructions to Ron all class long. They probably could have worked out some pre-class notes for Ron that might not have been quite as good but still helpful, though I suspect that never occurred to either Harry or Ron. Hermione flat-out refuses to use the book, though that absolutely floors me, because as someone who's a bit of a know-it-all herself I can't imagine not being very interested in seeing refined instructions to things I want to master. Of course, Hermione's a very by-the-book sort which kind of separates her from Harry in less drastic ways throughout the series, too.

It didn't feel like cheating at all to me, obviously; I suspect Slughorn might have even found it cunning, had he realized what Harry was up to.

[accioslash.livejournal.com]

I may not think that Harry is cheating by using the HBP's book, but *Harry* obviously thinks so. Why else would he tear off the cover of the new potions book he ordered and replace the insides with Snape's old book?

here from the Snitch

[clare-dragonfly.livejournal.com]

I can't see how it can possibly be cheating. Okay, Harry isn't an American college student, but American college students buy used books--often with highlights and notes in the margins--all the time. Nobody thinks it's cheating when we use them, whether for classwork or for papers.

It also drives me crazy that Madam Pince freaks out like that when she sees the book and all the writing in it. Writing in books is GOOD. Grrr.

[rhoswen-rosier.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's cheating at all and I don't see why Hermione's so offended and upset by it. If he used it like during a test when they were supposed to be doing things from memory or something, that's a little different, but there's no reason for him not to use the extra notes.

[bluemeanies4.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's cheating but I can see why Hermione disapproves of it and calls it cheating. She does all this hard work and then Harry just breazes through.

I would kind of compare it to how a student who actually read the novel and studied feels about the kid who aced it using Cliff Notes. In fact, the way Harry seems to have not improved when the book is removed makes the Cliff Notes comparison more accurate in a scary way.

[juju-bean.livejournal.com]

It's cheating. Harry is benefitting off of someone else's work. He put no thought or effort into his potions, preferring to take the easy way out. They're graded on each potion they make, so it's just like using someone else's notes during a test.

[everythingisaid.livejournal.com]

Haha, and word.

[littlemousling]

Have to agree. It's not quite like reading the Sparknotes instead of the book, but it's very close. There's a reason he had to keep the profs from finding out about it.

[conuly]

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.

[conuly]

He didn't have to. He just chose not to, because he bought into the same idea Hermione did, that it wasn't appropriate to use material that wasn't printed officially, and that the point of a class is to be better than other people. That's nonsense. The point of a class is to learn, which is exactly what he did, and exactly what Hermione could've done if she hadn't been so closed-minded.

Except for Snape. He did have to hide it from Snape - but that was because of the fact that 1. Snape hates him and would use any excuse to confiscate the helpful book and 2. he'd learned some dark Jinxes from the book, which he wouldn't want to admit to having done.

Re: here from the Snitch

[nights-mistress.livejournal.com]

Well, if it's a library book, I can understand the irritation!

Re: here from the Snitch

[clare-dragonfly.livejournal.com]

But it's not, and she keeps shrieking at him even after he says that.

Re: here from the Snitch

[nights-mistress.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but if I remember my own high school days correctly, Harry has been marked a Book Despoiler, for having chocolate in the library. The REAL reason why Harry isn't going back for his seventh year is because Pince will kill him if he's anywhere NEAR her library.
< /tongue in cheek>

Re: here from the Snitch

[clare-dragonfly.livejournal.com]

::laughs:: Hey, I'd be scared of her too.

[grrliz.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.

[agnes-bean.livejournal.com]

Harry was using someone else’s work to get a good reputation/good grades in the class. Is this technically cheating? I don’t know, it might depend how the potions were used in terms of grading. But it sure does violate any honor code I’ve ever see.

And I don’t think it’s quite the same thing as a student going out and doing extra research about a potion. For one thing, it seems to me that the Prince’s advice was ingenious, not something anyone could find with a little bit of research. After all, Snape IS supposed to be an extrodinary potions maker. And for another thing, people who go out and research did just that…research. They still had to work to find any extra information. Again, maybe Harry wasn’t cheating, but I do think he was being unethical.

Also, while conuly is right, and education is about learning, I think it would be wrong to say that Harry used the extra notes to actually learn anything. He used them to get the potion right. It's like, last year in math, to prep us for the AP test, our teacher gave us graded problem sets to do, where we had to show all of our work. He also gave us detailed answers, which were allowed to refer to if we got stuck, as long as we mentioned that in our answer set. The point was that the answers he gave us would be a tool we could use to learn. What Harry did was the equivalent of just coping out the answers and handing them in, instead of trying to work the problem out on his own, and only referring to the answers when he got stuck. I mean, without that book, I doubt Harry could duplicate his results.

[agnes-bean.livejournal.com]

Note: That’s not to say I think he’s a terrible person for doing what he did. Heck, I probably would have done the same thing. I just feel like it’s not the “noble” thing, and most teachers would probably consider it cheating.