June: Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests
I've finally found time to do a prompt for @hp-12monthsofmagic !! I took a somewhat unorthodox approach to the prompt, but either way I hope everyone likes it!!
All ocs involved are my own, but there's a lil reference to @the-al-chemist 's Hexley Saga in there too!
(a cute picrew of a sleepy matt i made a while back as a bonus)
Oftentimes in Wizarding Education, certain students will come across their own ancestors within the school curriculum, or perhaps the precise spell or potion required for them to surpass a problem they are facing at the time. We therefore give leniency whenever said students decide to be a little snarky when it comes to things that appear in their N.E.W.T. exam which may have either helped them in their school years, or perhaps tried to kill them. Some examples from both recent years and in the past are shown below to show examiners what sort of sarcastic jabs to accept (after all, it is technically a form of showing your working.) - Professor Tofty
Defence against the Dark Arts : True or False: All forms a Boggart can take can be transformed into something to be laughed at with Riddikulus or defeated at all. Explain your answer.
“False - sometimes the fears they show are too traumatic or inescapable to be changed by Riddikulus. However, the statement also says that they cannot be defeated at all, which according to conventional magic is true but recent developments in wandless magic mean that boggarts can be transformed into things that provide hope with the spell Gratia Salutaris (If this has not been recognised by the curriculum yet, I apologise)” - Matthew Luther, 1991 (he would make several more apologies in his answers throughout the exams)
Herbology: Outline and Evaluate the use of flesh-eating slugs to clear weeds of magical and non-magical varieties.
“To use flesh-eating slugs would be a disastrous idea for a variety of reasons, for instance the possible damage they could do to the magic of the natural area if they are allowed to graze freely much like miniature cattle, the fact that they are unable to discriminate between what qualifies as a weed and what is a desired plant, that the use of the word “weed” is fundamentally flawed as it removes any possible uses the plant might have; as a matter of fact these slugs might accidentally destroy a weed which holds the cure for dragon pox within, just because some fool thought it didn’t fit with his lawn. The flesh-eating may also be a problem, I suppose.” - Atticus Doherty, 1890’s (this is one of 19 examples of snark within Mr Doherty’s Herbology N.E.W.T. answers)
Care of Magical Creatures: Explain why Acromantula in Britain have been deemed unapproachable despite them being sentient creatures.
“Because they’re all, pardon my French, assholes. In a place like New York, an acromantula’s gonna be all too willing to help you out if a sorcerer gets lost in that brilliant, sprawling city. In Britain, meanwhile, they wouldn’t even lift a leg to help a student out who got trapped in a Forest, even if they’d been cursed with sleepwalking and unable to wake up until some crystal in a Vault got broken. The Acromantula just thinks that all that means a free meal, and until they stop seeing humans in need as free meals, they’re not gonna get to join the cool spiders in New York, who actually contribute to society, like how they inspired Spider-Man.” - Mayson Kowalski, 1992 (MACUSA recently asked if they could use Mr Kowalski’s answers to help inform their travel brochures to the magical part of New York City.)
Potions: “Amortentia should be made illegal.” To what extent do you agree, using evidence from your knowledge of potion-making?
“Amortentia is quite possibly one of the most dangerous potions in existence and yet it is still often sold very freely from joke shops. While I understand that their use is something of a tradition, it is one that needs to be halted as soon as possible. While the moral reasons for limiting the use of the potion are obvious, in terms of potion-making there is no general consensus in the potioneering community on just how powerful Amortentia can be, what the long-term effects of its use are, or if it can have a negative impact during pregnancy (trialling of which would be very much unethical, even by Wizarding standards). Furthermore, when brewed incorrectly the potion can gather something of an intelligence in order to create hallucinations and entice nearby people to drink from it, which directly contravenes ethical guidelines on trust towards intelligent magical items that lack an obvious physical brain. If I were to list the moral reasons too, I would be here all day.” - Joseph J. Luther, 1991 (examiners reported twice as much “unprofessional” language from this question than any other question)
Divination: Predict how many marks you will receive for your answer to this question based on your own chosen method of divining future events.
“From my predictions, I foresee that I will get full marks, on this question at least. Of course, this is partially influenced by how much I want to get a good score, as well as the general loopiness of this question. Furthermore, it lets me do something rather interesting to demonstrate my divinatory power, namely that every time someone reads over this answer, a bird will fly just outside the window. If I’m right, you can give me full marks!” - Jane Luther, 2015 (Ms. Luther’s exams are to be held in the Department of Mysteries once they have been marked and whatever magic her answers have caused has been cleaned up, and you are asked to scorch out her questions on this example sheet when you are done with it, not only for the sake of our understanding of magic, but so that you do not have a flock of birds outside your window - something Professor Tofty discovered the hard way.)
Charms: Explain why the use of chronomancy is so limited for sorcerers.
“The main reason is that human reflexes aren’t capable of the constant exact rhythm needed to perform time magic. Sort of like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time, a sorcerer would need to perform so many movements at such precise times that it is likely that they would never get more than a few seconds backwards or forwards on their own, barring freak accidents. To combat this though, I think that the use of non-magical technologies such as clockwork could be vital in solving this. With something like a pocket watch a person could use the precise rhythms created by gears and mechanisms to complete that part of the spell and hey presto, chronomancy is far easier!” -Frederick Graham, 1890s. (While this was marked harshly at the time, when Mr. Graham helped to invent the time turner soon after leaving school his grade was retroactively raised from a P to an E, and that marker was fired for incompetence and a general lack of creativity.)
History of Magic: Why was there a degree of resistance to the creation of Hogwarts in the 10th century?
“Simply put, the many lords and nobles of the British Isles at the time all had something of a temper tantrum when it was suggested that the mages they relied on should be treated with a modicum of respect and privacy. They tried their hardest to convince sorcerers working for them to actively combat any attempt to make Hogwarts a reality, helped in part by the Silver Kingdom of the Changelings. However, it could be argued that this was more a hindrance than a help as it soon tied the nobles to the fate of the Silver Kingdom, but because the question only asked “why” I can simply leave my answer here.” - Trinity Reynolds, 1999 (History of Magic has seen a remarkable increase of snark in recent years after the sucking off (the technical term for a ghost moving on to the afterlife) of Professor Binns.)
These examples form a common trend of trying to cope with the immense pressure that N.E.W.T.s bring to students of Hogwarts. While it is certainly true that they must revise a great deal of content and write it in a way that is understandable, the manner of how they present that information is mostly up to them; thus, being teenagers almost finished with schooling and likely in a swelteringly hot room, showing one’s work through snark becomes a desirable option, and one that we have grown to accommodate for. - Professor Tofty.