Charming. on Cascade Hall

The Wizarding Council's Official Examiners

October 23, 2009 4:10 AM

The Ridiculously Anal Testing of Skills by The Wizarding Council's Official Examiners

Two weeks of examinations was bad by almost anyone's standards, but when they came along with the name 'Ridiculously Anal Testing of Skills' they took on a whole new aspect. Examination timetables had been handed out a fortnight beforehand, so no one could legitimately claim to be caught unawares of when their exams were to be held. The hall had been rearranged for the exams and the waterfalls silenced. At the front of the room the examiners sent by the council conferred quietly (except in the case of one wizard) while waiting for the students to arrive and settle into their appointed seats.

Two of the examiners required no introduction. David Weatherby and Bernard Starsky had been at Sonora only the week before, examining the fifth years taking their CATS, and were almost certainly still familiar to the seventh years from when they'd taken their own CATS. Nothing much had changed since the week past, although Starsky had started to favour his right leg somewhat. It seemed, beyond all reason, that this had also caused his vocal volume to increase. Alongside the two wizards, the final examiner, Aurora Septentrion, looked far more feminine. It helped that she was a witch. A little below average height, her blonde hair fell loose down her back, although with such order that it was almost certain that there was a crafty charm at work keeping it neat and untangled. A pair of elliptical spectacles was perched on her nose, framing her light blue eyes. She didn't smile, at least not in this environment; Septentrion took her work and responsibilities seriously.

The specially designed examination quills were handed out once the students had found their seats, and papers and examination booklets were placed on every desk by the younger two examiners. The third watched all with a suspicious eye, keeping a close eye on the time.

"This," Starsky bellowed at the students without preamble, "is the first of your RATS examinations. We expect you to take them seriously and not to do anything dishonest. That means no cheating. No distracting others taking examinations. And no cheating." He engorgio'd his clockwork stopwatch and charmed it to stick to the front wall. "You will start when the second hand reaches the top, and you have two hours and thirty minutes to complete the paper. Begin."

This was, of course, only the beginning. Written examinations were being held of a morning and after a generous hour and a half break for lunch - and, undoubtedly, practice. And cramming - practicals for the same subject took place in the afternoon, although in a one-on-one format with the examiners. This would continue over the next two weeks while every subject taught at Sonora was covered. It was long and grueling, but at least once it was done there was the summer - and life as an adult - to look forward to.

OOC: Same as with the CATS, pick your examiner - from those mentioned in the post - for the practicals. Good luck.

Subthreads:

Charming. by Saul Pierce with

I never did care for rodents. by Lila St. Martin with

0 The Wizarding Council's Official Examiners The Ridiculously Anal Testing of Skills 0 The Wizarding Council's Official Examiners 1 5

Saul Pierce

October 25, 2009 1:23 AM

Charming. by Saul Pierce

Saul wasn't quite sure why he was even here. The RATS meant nothing at all to him or his future. He could do charms well enough to meet every conceivable use he might have for them in the real world, so he didn't understand why he needed a test to tell him that.

He also knew perfectly well that he barely understand the first thing about the magical theory behind the charms, and he felt he had even less reason to take a test to tell him that. The test and essay scores he'd gotten back over the last seven years had made that very clear already. He wasn't the smartest kid in the school by any means but even Saul was bright enough not to need a RATS level test to tell him he was practically gifted but theoretically challenged. His teachers certainly didn't.

The RATS purpose, so far as Saul could tell, was for the smart students - to seperate the merely good from the extraordinary geniuses. The average and below average kids like him were just there to be made to feel even more incompetant than normal.

Saul had accepted he was incompetant a long time ago, he had no vested interest in passing any of his RATS, so it didn't bother him, but he felt kind of bad for some of his other classmates. And there were other, more fun, things he could be doing with these two weeks, like spending time with Elly, who he wasn't going to see hardly at all next year.

Not to mention, the quiet of the Hall bothered him. He hated silence almost as much as he hated being alone. It creeped him out. The lack of the sound from the waterfalls was downright unnatural for this place. It made him fidget as much as the test taking nerves were affecting some of his fellow seventh years. He just wanted to get out of here.

After the quills were handed out and the proctor finished speaking, Saul began scuffing the bottoms of his feet against the floor, trying not to disturb his neighbors, but needing some kind of aural stimulation not to go mad in the far too quiet room. The sound of quills moving against paper all over the room helped, too, but not nearly enough.

The test didn't matter. The written part really didn't matter. Saul read through the questions and marked down answers, but he didn't put any effort into any of it. The ones he knew, he marked down to the best of his ability, but those he didn't - which was a far larger proportion of them, even here in Charms which was his best subject by far - he just wrote down the first thought to pop into his head, most of which answers were completely implausible even to him.

Spelling errors and bad handwriting made even the ones he knew difficult to comprehend. There was a solid reason why all his essays and homeworks were written by dictation quill. Unfortunately for the examination board, that was not one of the charms on the RATS quills, else they could have been spared the creative spelling and all but illegible penmanship. Saul certainly wasn't sparing any time to make it more readable.

His difficulty reading made even this haphazard and apathetic exam method take longer than it did for some of his more talented classmates to finish it properly, but he was still done before about half of them, glad to get out of there for the break where he could eat lunch and talk and laugh and get out of that way creepily quiet Hall.

Later, when he returned for the practical, Starsky called his name, and Saul performed each of the charms requested, if not flawlessly, then at least adequately. He might not understand how it worked, but it worked. That was the beauty of charms work. You just needed will, imagination, a bit of performance talent in areas of choreography and diction, and the faith that it would work, and it usually would. Saul lacked none of those talents.

Even the senior proctor seemed to think Saul was reasonably gifted at the subject, remarking briefly on Saul's 'clean technique' as he marked something down on his grading pad. Saul just wanted it over so he didn't waste too much time in idle chatter or extraneous flourishes, and Starsky seemed to be on the same page. He was done in less than ten minutes, and allowed to escape back to the Pecari where he could spend the rest of the day having a lot more fun with Elly and Irene. He was thinking they might try to get in another soccer game tonight if they could rummage up enough players.

1 Saul Pierce Charming. 82 Saul Pierce 0 5

Saul Pierce

October 26, 2009 2:42 PM

Transfigured. by Saul Pierce

Transfiguration held an unusual position in Saul Pierce's regard. He thought it was difficult and it did not come easily to him. The theory was impossible for him to grasp, even when Allie tried to explain it in the simplest terms used to teach first years. Even Simon, who was able to get him to perform the spells by way of sheer determination and perseverance, never came close to getting to Saul to understand why it worked. If Saul didn't think it would be useful later in his life, he would have dropped it like a sack of tofu.

But he liked the idea of transfiguration. He could see applications for it in his real life after Sonora. So he worked at it. It was the only class he put any kind of effort into, since Charms came so easily, and the rest didn't matter. He'd studied his tail off to pass the CATS so he could keep taking the class at the RATS level. (Notice, he didn't have a tail anymore - wait, no, he'd never had a tail. But if he had, he would have studied it off.)

The RATS were a different story entirely. He still studied Transfiguration much harder than he did any other subject, but that was because he wanted to be able to perform them on stage. Like Charms, he did not need a standardized test to tell him if he could do that. If he could consistently repeat his routine, then he could do it. So far, he hadn't seen a problem, and if one did crop up, the cure was more practice, not a stupid test telling him he was a failure.

Like in Charms, Saul spent the written part struggling most with reading the question rather than answering them. It wasn't just his poor reading comprehension that was a problem this time, though that was definitely a contributing factor. Even if he'd been asked some of the questions verbally, he still wouldn't have known even what they were asking.

So to the question "when using [some gobbeldy-gook] to transfigure a hairpin into a mechanical clock while accounting for [something incomprehensible], explain how the [these words may not even in be in English]?" Saul just blinked at it, re-read it once more with no clearer understanding, and wrote:

Pepperoni.

He figured he couldn't go wrong there. He even spelled it right. And since it was an essay question and a picture was worth a thousand words, he drew a picture of a pepperoni to fill in some of the extra space. Of course, his drawing skills were not significantly better than his written English skills were, so who knew what the proctors might interpret it as. Saul was less than concerned. It was just more fun to draw a piece of pepperoni than it was to come up with more words to answer a question he just didn't grasp on any level.

Other questions, he could make things up for, make it sound good, even if it was all completely wrong in every way, but that one, he didn't even know where to begin. The only thing that came to mind was pepperoni. He was hungry.

Like in Charms, when he returned for his practical exam, it went better. With Simon's help, he'd gotten even the toughest spells down, though a few had taken until that very morning to master with consistency. He was actually pretty proud of the accomplishment, so when the proctor asked him to do some of the spells Professor Skies had taught them, Saul performed at his very best, and gave a flourishing bow when he was done, quite pleased with himself.

1 Saul Pierce Transfigured. 82 Saul Pierce 0 5

Saul Pierce

October 26, 2009 3:31 PM

Darkly Defending. by Saul Pierce

Defense Against the Dark Arts had lost most of its appeal after Saul broke up with the Professor's daughter. Prior to that event, he'd tried hard, hoping to impress not just his girlfriend but also her somewhat imposing dad so that the DADA teacher didn't feel inclined hex the idiot guy who wasn't good enough for Briony. (Under other circumstances, Saul usually thought he was good enough, but every time he walked into the DADA classroom, this opinion was thrown into question. Professor O'Leary scared Saul in an entirely different way than he scared most of his students.)

But after they broke up, Saul lost motivation. If he'd had more than just half a year left, he probably would have dropped the class entirely, but he'd been taking it for six and a half years already. It seemed kind of pathetic to drop out with just a handful of months left. So he stayed and coasted, no longer putting in the effort to really excel, but picking up the trivia and spells that struck him as interesting or potentially useful in the life of a nomadic small-time actor.

Besides, like Professor O'Leary was always trying to impress on them, you never knew when you might need to defend yourself or your family against the Dark Arts. The California Pierces were hardly the most popular of people and they lived outdoors in tents. Half didn't have any magic, and of those that did, few knew advanced magical defenses. If some purist wizard (or witch) went psycho and decided to wipe out the mongrel family most closely associated with the Integration with Muggles political party, they'd make a very pretty target.

Consequently, Saul found most of the last few units interesting and/or potentially useful. He doubted he'd ever actually need them, but if he did, he wasn't going to curse himself for not paying attention in school.

To his surprise, he found that he could answer even more of the questions on the written exam than he could in the Charms test. It helped that it was asking less theory and more random facts, and a lot of it was from the units when he was still trying very hard to make the school's two O'Learys notice him in a favorable light.

His handwriting and spelling were still abysmal, but if the graders could make out what he was trying to say, he should test better in DADA than he had so far. Unfortunately, having plenty of real stuff to say, Saul ran out of time, so the last essay question remained blank.

Worse, he had only an hour and a half to enjoy his lunch and hang around in the sunny Gardens.

He returned for the practical. As was his norm for the subject, he did well with the defensive spellwork, poor with the offensive spellwork, and mediocre with the Dark Creatures. He was able to neutralize the two easier critters - a Devil's Snare and a boggart - but the fake werewolf would have totally eaten him if it hadn't been fake. He'd also been able to ramble on about a whole bunch of facts concerning all three Creatures, two thirds of which might have even been true.

As he walked back to Pecari afterwards, he wondered if maybe he might have gotten an A on a RATS test. He didn't think he did any worse than borderline passing, in both the practical and the written, which was, like, unheard of.

1 Saul Pierce Darkly Defending. 82 Saul Pierce 0 5

Saul Pierce

October 26, 2009 4:22 PM

Historic Magic. Divine. by Saul Pierce

Saul's second to last RATS exam was for History of Magic. Technically, the last one was barely an option, as he hadn't taken the subject since his CATS and he hadn't been following it up with individual study. But he actually wanted to take the Divination exam. He hadn't really done much with the subject since Professor Yuma stopped teaching it, but he felt his family had taught him well enough that he might do well on it even without any formal training recently. He'd learned to read tarot before he'd learned to read English.

And since the RATS were standardized across the nation, it was offered if anyone signed up for it, even if only one person took it.

But first, there was History. There was a tiny bit of pressure here. There had been no pressure for any the RATS, and Saul still didn't really care what he got, but there was something to be said for redemption. He'd failed the CATS. He shouldn't have even been in the RATS level class. He'd taken it solely on the sufferance of the Professors Flatt, and suffered they had.

Like Divination, Saul would have taken the History RATS for fun, just to see what he could get. He was actually almost hopeful that he'd pass, just because he wanted to make Henry Flatt fall off his chair when he got the results. Saul hadn't turned in a single serious test, essay, or homework assignment once in the two years since he'd bombed the CATS.

Today, he answered each question to the best of his knowledge. He only made things up when he honestly didn't know, and even then he guessed things that sounded plausible.

He wasn't trying to pass for his own sake. He was trying to make it up to the Flatts for letting him get away with everything they let him get away with. He'd heard somewhere that professors were evaluated on how their students did in the exams, and he didn't want to get either Flatt in trouble. The Flatts were possibly his favorite teachers.

O'Leary had gotten the same consideration, but Saul's Charms and Transfiguration teachers had been many and varied, so he didn't feel bad about completely throwing the written there.

Again, he ran out of time. He was a slow writer and an even slower reader. But he thought he might have maybe done well enough to make Henry Flatt lose his seat when he found out that Saul had actually learned something in his class after all. In any event, he knew he did better than a Troll, which was possibly all Flatt was expecting of him. Saul had never done better than a T on any assignment Flatt the Younger had ever graded, after all.

A few days later, in the Divination exam, he had the greatest pressure he had felt in any of the RATS exams. This test was not testing how well Sonora taught him. This test was testing how well his family had. There would be consequences if he didn't do well. It was the only RATS exam he'd went out of his way to study for.

Fortunately, Saul found, his family was brilliant. The test ventured very close to easy. Perhaps it was just that Divination wasn't as complicated as the core subjects taught at Sonora, or maybe it was because he'd been trained in the theories of Divination since the day he spoke his first word, but he didn't need to guess for a single question on the written. The only ones he didn't answer fully were the ones he didn't get to because he ran out of time.

The practical was not nearly so easy. He actually did have a very tiny glimmer of True Sight - which oddly seemed focused around the ability to locate pepperoni - that his father was trying to help him develop over the summers, but his family made a farce of the actual implementation of the usual Divination methods, instead using it to make money selling muggles what they wanted to hear rather than attempting to divine anything serious. Having any of the Gift at all was more hindrance than help. Still, Saul could fake it with the best of them, and he did so now.

1 Saul Pierce Historic Magic. Divine. 82 Saul Pierce 0 5

Lila St. Martin

October 28, 2009 8:52 PM

I never did care for rodents. by Lila St. Martin

On the first morning of her RATS, Lila did exactly the same thing she did every morning: she got up, spent half an hour primping in front of her mirror, and ate very little of the light breakfast she served herself in the Cascade Hall. The Calming Draught in her pocket would make her feel nauseated without more than an orange on her stomach, but after seven weeks of feeling like she was an inch from a breakdown, she was almost used to that. The trick was to sit very straight and keep her mouth shut, which was much easier than working out a diet that would let her fit into her ballgowns before the first dances of the summer.

Her RATS didn't really matter. She needed to make something higher than a Troll on the three exams, just so her husband would know she had enough basic intelligence to clean up in an emergency and obey instructions, but neither her parents nor anyone else cared if she actually did well. In fact, it was almost better if she didn't do too well; she was seventeen and still unengaged, which made getting engaged a priority, and being overtly intelligent would not help with that. For that reason, she could only conclude that she had put way too much effort into the Bonfire; there was no good alternate explanation for why she was nervous about exams.

She sat up very straight during the proctor's introduction, her mouth shut tight and breathing slowly through her nose. Her head was full of a sort of blank buzzing, which she had started to notice happening when she took Calming Draughts; if she had not felt so very apathetic because of that, Lila would have thought Morgaine was trying to poison her. There was a good reason not to let girls be too educated; who had ever heard of a girl from a good family, with money and one living brother, going to medical school? Of course Morgaine could never marry - Aunt Emma said she'd never have babies, not without it killing her, and Uncle Alasdair was much out of society's favor these days anyway - but she could make a proper old maid of herself and stay out of a man's field...

She heard a throat clear, and realized she was staring off to one side, where one of her classmates was bent over the exam booklet. Blushing slightly, she wrote out her name in her best handwriting and forced her attention to the first question of her test.

1) Explain, in detail, the theoretical basis for the Fidelius Charm

Oh, Merlin, they would start with that. Allie had tried her best to explain it, but Lila had barely paid attention; she still refused to take anything Allie said seriously. With a silent sigh, she began to write.

The idea behind the Fidelius Charm is to completely hide a secret inside a person, who keeps it faithfully; the word Fidelius means 'faithfully' in Latin. She was sure that had featured into something Allie said. There had been some very sentimental-sounding part, too. Some forms of magic are based on emotion, like trust. When the person tells the secret, then the trust magic is broken, and the person that the Secret-Keeper told the secret to can now work with that secret.

She very purposefully did not look to see if anyone else's test paper was black with tiny, dense handwriting. She was sure she had come up with enough for partial credit, which was enough. She had an exam minus one question left to go, which was much better than having an exam.

2) Describe the degree of relationship between physical and magical strength and their relevance to the Levitation Charm.

That seemed simple enough. If only her head would stop buzzing... Her neck felt unpleasantly hot, and Lila pushed her hair off it with her free hand as she made an effort to keep her eyes and mind on the question. The physical and magical strength of a person do not possess any relationship. If they did, Morgaine would be the next thing to a Squib, and Lila truly believed her step-cousin was capable of blowing up the Hall if it took her fancy to do so. Your magical strength determines what you can do with a Levitation Charm.

It went on. And on. Though none of her answers, including those for the mini-essays, were very long, her hand began to seize up after about thirty minutes and still ached so she wanted to hold it as the papers were taken up. As she left the Hall, she carefully avoided her sister's eyes.

The practical exam went - somewhat - better. She was lucky enough to be called by Professor Septentrion, who, despite the lack of decorum her holding of a job indicated, had an admirable level of control over her appearance. Lila first judged all other women by their personal appearance, and a witch who could keep her hair as perfect as Lila's own was clearly someone she could deal with. She gave the examiner her brightest smile and, for appearances' sake, didn't ask what charms Aurora thought were best for flyaways.

The older witch didn't smile back. "This is the practical exam for Charms," she said. "Levitate this water from the glass and then lower it back."

It took a complicated twirl of her wand after the standard swish and flick to do it, but she got almost all of it one or two centimeters above the top of the glass. Lowering it didn't go as well; she lost her grip on the spell, and the water splashed back down to earth without ceremony. With a muffled shriek, Lila jumped back to save her shoes, only a small part of her mind wondering if she'd get a few points for the bit of water that had, by chance, landed on target in the glass. Aurora made a note, her face expressionless, before she looked up again. "Dry that up," she ordered.

Lila did so, happy to see that spell go perfectly. Aurora said nothing about it. "Create a woodless fire in the jar to your left," came the order instead.

That much was easy. It got harder when the next directive was to turn the fire green, then split it and have a half be blue, and then to split it even further and manipulate more than one segment at much while keeping them all four different colors. After a minute, she began to feel woozy on top of everything else, which didn't help. By the time she was allowed to stop that, she felt actually tired.

And there was still a lot of exam to go.

16 Lila St. Martin I never did care for rodents. 80 Lila St. Martin 0 5

Lila St. Martin

November 03, 2009 9:10 PM

...Or work, for that matter. by Lila St. Martin

Lila had taken Potions for one reason, and one reason only: she had scraped the requisite mark in it on her CATS, which she had not done in enough other subjects to get out of the class. If she'd had her way, she would have dropped Potions like a pair of purple dragonhide boots. It was nasty, there were way too many smart people signed up for it, and, worst of all, her Uncle Julian specialized in it.

Genius was not exactly unheard of in her family. Nor was an amount of insanity. Uncle Julian possessed both. Though the weirdo hardly ever came out of his lab, Lila had gotten the impression that he was something of a 'figure' in Potions-y circles. She could hardly care less about such circles, but the ever-present fear remained that, if he ever found out a slight hint of aptitude for the subject existed in her, she would spend the rest of her natural life cutting up strange things and tending to fires while Julian furthered the arts of the cauldron and made his reputation greater than it was already. Serving the best interests of her family was noble and good, but not at the expense of ruining her hands.

For this reason, she had consistently performed below what she was actually capable of in the class. It lead to a lot of frustration when she could practically hear Elly Eriksson and the Laynes and Morgaine thinking of her as an idiot, but it had saved her summers. Now, though, Lila was almost afraid it was going to cook her bacon; now that she thought about it, she'd tried so hard to look like she was learning nothing that she wasn't sure if she actually had.

The papers were passed out as before, with a near-identical speech as a preface. If testing had not been so repetitive, so perfectly predictable in its forms, that Lila had always found it soothing, she doubted she would have ever passed a single year. She wrote her name, and other descriptive data required by the Council, out in her flourishing handwriting and then opened her booklet, already expecting a disaster.

1. Describe the physical appearance of the Polyjuice Potion.

Lila sighed. It would be just her luck that they'd begin with a trick question. Did they mean when it was on its own, or when it had someone in it? She began to write about the former. It's thick and looks like mud with a lot of bubbles in. It's ugly. When you put a piece of the person you want to turn into in it, it bubbles a lot, and then it changes colors.

She should get most of the credit for that...On to number two.

2. List the ingredients of the Draught of Peace.

Great Merlin, they wanted her to remember what was in it? She could see the potion in her head, she'd helped brew it for the Bonfire competitions, but...She had very, very little idea what went into it. Scrambling, she wrote the first thing that came to mind. Moonstones. She thought that sounded right. Peaceful, sleepy, the moon... Now she just had to come up with a bunch of others. An ounce of healall. Unicorn tailhair. Essence of nighshade. Silver. Wolfsbane. Salamander blood. That looked like enough ingredients to her.

For her practical, she was assigned to Mr. Weatherby. Lila tried a smile on him, and the calm smile she got back came as conclusive proof that the world hated her and wasn't in the mood to give her so much as a little point for being a pretty girl of excellent breeding. When given the options, she picked Easy without even thinking about it. After that travesty of a written exam, she was sure that not even the best potion ever made could scrape a pass for her.

The mixed blessing of Potions classes - that it was almost impossible for anyone to keep their work private - was not an issue for the exam. Lila found this inconvenient in the extreme. It was a lot harder to concentrate when it was all quiet except for Mr. Weatherby's notations, and it was no cake walk to work without other people's work about to show her what to do. Through some miracle, though, Lila looked down at her final product and realized that horrid-smelling smoke was not pouring off its surface, it did not seem to be exploding, and it was even something that would at least, if shade names were suddenly outlawed, end up as part of the same 'purple' group as the lavender the little card said it was supposed to be.

She'd still failed. She knew it. Lila went back to her room in a temper, wondering why she hadn't quit school years ago before everyone realized she was an incompetent Squib.

16 Lila St. Martin ...Or work, for that matter. 80 Lila St. Martin 0 5