Chapter Text
A few days before the exams were to start, Professor McGonagall came around at breakfast with a pile of schedule sheets for them.
Harry took his when she gave it to him, then frowned and raised his paw. "Professor?"
The Transfiguration teacher looked around the hall, which was still fairly empty – Harry continued to be among the first to get up every morning – then nodded to him. "Yes, Mr. Potter?"
"I was wondering – do you hand out these to everyone in all four houses?" he asked. "And the same for the timetables? Because it seems like that's a lot of work."
"I think you will find that the Heads of House hand out the timetables for their own houses," Professor McGonagall told him.
"Huh," Harry mused. "I wonder why I've never noticed anyone who isn't you doing it..."
"That would be because when Professor Flitwick is handing out timetables, he's not handing out any to you, Mr. Potter," Professor McGonagall said, and Harry had to admit that that really was an excellent point.
The exams were spread over most of two weeks, with at least one theory exam for each subject and practical exams for Charms, Potions, Transfiguration, Herbology and Defence Against the Dark Arts. Defence was a new one, and Harry wondered what it would be like… as well as what it would have been like to do the practical exam for Defence if Lockhart was still the teacher. (Instead of, as he was now, sentenced to five years in Azkaban.)
Did the teachers set the exams? Harry wasn't sure about the theory ones, but then again the one he was wondering about was the practical anyway.
There probably wouldn't be anything on the theory exam about Lockhart's favourite colour, which was sort of a pity because they certainly all knew that by now.
Finishing some of what was labelled as leftover lasagne – Harry couldn't remember having lasagne last night, but then again maybe the Elves had just decided to make it and then serve it all as leftovers – Harry looked around to see who else he knew was here. The only first-year he knew was Colin, who was just as bright-eyed as ever, and who seemed to be having an argument with Lord Ridley.
"… don't really think that would work," Colin was saying.
"Why not?" Lord Ridley demanded. "Do you doubt the word of an expert dragon slayer?"
"Well, yeah," Colin replied. "Because I'm pretty sure that if most dragons were like that then they wouldn't need slaying."
He waved a book around. "And the dragons in this book are really nice, nicer than the people. And I don't think they've slayed anyone."
"The word is slain," Lord Ridley insisted. "And I stopped four wyrms from ravaging the countryside!"
"But Nora doesn't ravage the countryside," Colin said. "She doesn't even harry sheep. But then again Harry doesn't harry sheep either."
"I think you mean worrying sheep?" Harry asked, interjecting and making Lord Ridley jump about six inches in the air. "I can't help harrying things, because that's my name in the first place so you could say that anything I do counts as harrying."
"Harry!" Colin said. "And – oh – that's right, worrying is the word. But I don't think there are any sheep in this book."
Harry checked what the book was, and recognized it as one he'd read himself. "I think there are some sheep, they're just called herdbeasts."
He looked at Lord Ridley, who hadn't come down yet. "Do you mind if I sit here? I want to ask Colin about his exam schedule."
Colin shuffled up a spot to let Harry sit down, tugging his schedule out of his bag. "Here you go. Why do you want to know, Harry?"
"It's because of some of the other First Years," Harry explained. "If you have two essay papers in the same day it might be a problem because June and Tanisis find it hard to write fast."
"Oh, right!" Colin realized. "Yeah, they're really cool. Tanisis helped me with my History once."
He shrugged. "She did ask me when a door wasn't a door, but I worked out what the answer was."
Harry smiled, noticing that it looked like there was a History of Magic exam in the afternoon after a Charms theory paper in the morning, and decided to wait around to make sure both quadruped girls had seen it.
It was only polite, after all.
"...okay, so what do you think the best way to do this is?" Dean asked, once they were all through with their breakfast and looking at the Second-Year exam schedule. "Should we really focus on the subjects we have on the next day?"
"Well, we sort of know all the subjects pretty well by now," Ron said. "Practicing all the spells we've learned in a row is really going to help out with the practicals, and so is looking at how to do all the Potions – hey, we can write things down on note parchment, right?" he checked.
"We could last time," Harry agreed. "I think we should be able to this time."
"Right," Ron nodded. "So that means the first thing we should do once we sit down is look at the questions and write down anything that's absolutely needed for them on scrap parchment. Then, so long as we remember it going into the exam, we won't have that awful thing when you forget it..."
"Potter," Draco said, walking over with his friends Vincent and Gregory.
"Oh, good morning, Draco," Harry smiled. "Looking forward to the exams?"
"Blimey, bit keen," Ron muttered.
"You should enjoy them, it's the last time you'll be at Hogwarts," Draco said, with what Harry judged was probably a sneer. "My Father is going to be investigating the school with the rest of the board of governors, and you and the other animals will be expelled like you belong."
"Watch your mouth!" Dean said hotly.
There was a scuffling sound, which sounded a lot like Neville had done his best to stop Ron from hexing somebody.
Harry thought about that for a bit, including about how Draco was a Slytherin, then smiled. "Thank you, Draco!"
That made everyone just sort of look at Harry, surprised, and Harry did his best to explain.
"Well, I know Draco's a Slytherin," he began. "So I thought about why he'd say something like that. If he wanted me to be expelled, then he wouldn't give me any warning."
Draco seemed to be turning a funny colour, which was a bit odd, and Harry decided to keep explaining. "But obviously he can't just warn me that Mr. Malfoy is coming to try and get me expelled, because then he'd be doing something Mr. Malfoy doesn't want, and that's not how Slytherins do things. But if he gloated at me, and he just happened to say when Mr. Malfoy is going to show up, then he's warned me without having to actually warn me. It's very Slytherin."
He held out his paw for Draco to shake.
Draco stared at it, then at Harry's muzzle, and turned an even more peculiar colour.
"But I'm not-" he began. "I wasn't- but- um-"
After several seconds, he just turned and went back to the Slytherin table.
"That was brilliant," Neville said.
"Well, I did have to thank him," Harry said. "He's actually quite nice if you think about what he's saying."
The exams were on them within the next few days, and they started off with the Transfiguration theory paper.
Like most of them, it was a two hour exam, and Harry flipped through to check how many questions there were and how much each of them was worth before going back to the start.
In primary school, they'd been told how the best thing to do was to get the quick questions – the ones which gave a lot of marks compared to how long they would take to do – out of the way first, and only then really move on to the harder ones. That way at least they'd get the marks for the easy ones, and Harry supposed it would make someone doing an exam more confident as well.
That wasn't really possible with how Wizarding exams were laid out, because you had to answer the questions on separate pieces of parchment and they all had to be in order, but Harry decided to make some notes on what he thought the answers were to the questions that looked easiest – just to save time.
Then it was on to the first question, which was about Switching Spells. It reminded you what a Switching Spell was, which was nice, and you had to explain the downsides and upsides of them.
One of the obvious upsides was that a Switching Spell let you do some quite complicated things without having to look up a specific spell for it, so Harry started writing that down – saying as an example that if you wanted to give someone bat ears, a Switching Spell was a lot easier to do properly than a human transfiguration.
Then there was another upside, which was that they were easy to reverse as well – you could just switch things back again.
Harry took a bit longer to think of a downside, then decided that one of the important ones was that you had to have what you wanted already around to start with, and that once you cast the spell you sort of lost it. So if you wanted to give someone bat ears, the problem was that the bat would then end up with human ears – and you needed a bat to start with.
After about ten or fifteen minutes, he checked the time and realized that he should move on to the next question.
Keeping track of time in exams was tricky. Maybe he should get a watch like he'd been thinking about…
Harry quickly checked up on the First-Years after the first exam, to make sure that their new way of writing was going better, then headed up to do last-minute revision for the Charms practical.
None of them knew what the Charms spells in the practical would be, so in practice that meant they just sat around and called out spell names. When one of them sounded like a Charm that they might be doing in the exam everyone gave it a go.
"Are Muggle practicals like this?" Ron asked.
"You're asking the wrong people," Dean shrugged. "None of us did any practical exams in primary school, because primary school is mostly about learning times tables and how to read and stuff."
"And about sports, too," Harry volunteered. "We had sports day at my school."
"How did you do?" Dean asked. "I bet you did pretty well at the sprints."
"Not really, I didn't get picked for that one," Harry shrugged. "They got me to do the sack race, which was kind of a pain because I couldn't manage it with my wings."
Dean and Hermione thought about that.
"I can see how that would be a problem," Hermione admitted. "Unless you flew to the end."
"It didn't seem fair to fly, I thought it was one of the rules," Harry answered. "You know, like how with an egg and spoon race you're supposed to not hold the egg down with your hand."
"I've never really heard of that kind of race," Ron said. "Either of them. How do they work?"
"You never heard of these?" Dean asked. "What about the one where you have to carry a wet sponge and squeeze it into the bucket?"
Ron shook his head.
"Did you not have school sports days?" Dean pressed.
"We didn't have school, not really," Ron replied. "Mum taught us at home."
Hermione thought about that.
"She did a really good job," she decided. "Managing to teach all of you, I mean."
"I sort of wonder if she did best with Percy, sometimes," Ron admitted. "He was third, so she'd had practice, and he wasn't Fred or George so he was manageable."
"I think you've done well," Harry told him.
"Can we practice the Hover Charm?" Neville suggested, as Ron went kind of pink. "Sorry to interrupt, I keep getting that wrong."
"Oh, of course," Hermione said. "Let's see how you've been casting it."
Neville twirled his wand, and said 'Volito'. The book he was pointing at trembled slightly, then rolled sideways and fell over.
"I think you're not getting the wand movement quite right," Hermione judged. "You need to make sure the second loop is inside the first loop, not outside, otherwise it might mix up the up-ness with some down-ness."
"Is that the technical term?" Harry asked.
"No, but only since the 17th century," Hermione told him.
"Volito," Neville tried, and the book wobbled into the air before dropping back.
"Wait, hold on, are you serious about that?" Ron asked, frowning.
"Let's give it one more try," Hermione suggested, and Harry watched as Neville cast his Hover Charm. It did seem like the sort of thing they might do in the practical, so Harry decided to practice it himself as well and made his bag hover.
"It's almost time for the exam," Dean said, checking his watch. "We'd better head down there. I know Ron and I are right near the end of the alphabet, but sometimes they do it in reverse so Ron could end up being just after Blaise."
"Hermione?" Ron said plaintively. "Was upness really once a technical term?"
After the Charms practical, which went fairly well – Neville said he had to try about three or four times but he got the spell working in the end – and another theory paper, the Defence practical came along the next afternoon.
"Okay," Miss Nym said, as they all filed into a classroom. "All of you all ready for this?"
Harry was one of the many who sort of mumbled that, yeah, probably, but they didn't know what was actually going to happen.
"Great!" the Defence teacher said brightly. "So I thought you all deserved a bit of fun for your practical exam! I'll be calling two of you in to start, then the rest one at a time, and each of you will be doing some duelling!"
"Duelling?" Draco repeated, sounding interested. "At last, something worthwhile."
"I don't know if it sounds worthwhile," Neville said. "It sounds like you'd beat us really easily, because you're a grown-up."
"Don't worry, I didn't mean duelling me," Miss Nym reassured him. "I mean duelling each other."
"How's that fair?" Justin asked. "Duels don't normally have two winners, do they?"
"Which is why it wouldn't be fair if I said you all had to win to pass," Miss Nym answered. "Just do your best. Any other questions?"
Hermione put her hand up. "What about if someone who's good enough to pass gets put against someone who's much, much better? Wouldn't it look unfair?"
"Hermione, that's how everyone else feels in every other class," Parvati commented.
"Hey!" Lily Moon complained.
"Except for some Ravenclaws," Parvati amended her statement.
"Why not all Ravenclaws?" Harry asked, curious.
"I'm terribly nervous," Terry Boot told him. "Besides, I can read. Hermione's slightly ridiculous."
"You all done?" Miss Nym asked, waiting a moment to be sure the conversations were over. "Then the first of you come through here…"
She named two of the other students from Harry's year, opening the connecting door into a classroom that had had everything pushed to the side, and as they all went through there was a thumping sound and a muttered curse.
"Are you all right, Miss?" Ernie asked.
"Just stubbed my toe, don't worry," the DADA teacher muttered, and then the door closed.
Harry tilted his head, wondering if he could hear anything, but there must have been some kind of silence spell put up.
Or the wall was just thick. It could be that as well.
Harry was one of the first to be called in, and as he made his way to the door he twisted his tail around to check on his wand holder.
It seemed to be pretty snug, which was great, and he walked through into the second classroom.
"Hey, Harry," Su Li said, nodding to him. Harry waved back, and Miss Nym told him to stand over to the other side of the classroom.
"Remember, in a formal duel, you both bow to one another," the teacher said. "Seems pretty British to me."
Harry chuckled, and the two of them both bowed.
"Oh, yeah, and don't try anything that might seriously hurt the other duelist," Miss Nym added. "Not that you should know a spell that does that anyway, but I have to say."
Harry nodded his understanding.
"And – begin," Miss Nym said.
Su immediately raised her wand, calling out the incantation for the Body-Bind, and Harry dodged to the side – he wasn't sure if it would lose him marks if he got hit, but it was probably best to treat it like he should avoid being hit anyway.
Three loping strides and he was getting close to the tables that had been pushed to the edge of the room, so he jumped up on top of them and stopped for a moment.
"Tarantallegra!" he called, pointing his wand, but it was harder than he remembered to aim properly with his tail and Su stepped to the side to avoid the jet of light.
"Rictusempra!" the Ravenclaw witch replied, and Harry jumped into the air – wings hammering as the spell hit the wall behind where he'd been – then dropped back to the ground, flying quickly in a circle to try and get around behind her.
Su turned quickly, casting a Jelly-Legs Jinx, and Harry saw it hit one of his wings.
It didn't have any effect, but maybe that would mean he'd lost marks?
Jumping, Harry beat both wings hard, using the force to turn around and go back in the direction he'd come from. Su hadn't seen him do that before, partly because he'd just invented it, and her next spell missed completely.
Harry quickly cast an Expelliarmus, and then a Stupefy, but the first spell missed and Su cast a shielding spell with Protego before the second reached her. It didn't look like a very strong Shield Charm, to Harry, but it stopped his Stunning Spell before breaking.
Jumping into the air again, Harry inhaled and flew over to the other side of the room. He deliberately tried to make the fire go down the wrong way, and coughed out a big cloud of black smoke, which (he hoped) would hide where he was while he got sorted out again.
"Rictusempra, Rictusempra, Rictusempra," Su incanted, over and over, shooting jets of light into the smoke cloud, and at least one more of them hit Harry while he worked out what to do next.
Coughing out some more smoke, he did his best to listen to where Su was, then stuck his head out of the smoke so he could actually see for sure.
His tail poked out of the cloud as well, and Su was already moving to the side as Harry called out "Expelliarmus!" - but he'd swapped his wand from his tail to his right paw, so Su's dodge didn't work and her wand went sailing into the air.
Jumping, Harry caught the wand in mid-air, then let out a relieved huff.
"Well done, both of you!" Miss Nym said with a smile. "Excellent work!"
Harry passed Su back her wand, and looked around the room where they'd been having there duel.
He hadn't realized it while he'd been doing it, but climbing all over the tables on one side of the room had broken some of the wood, and there were a few broken bits in the smoke cloud as well where Su's spells had hit.
"Not to worry, kids," Miss Nym added, flourishing her wand. "Reparo."
The damaged bits of the room repaired themselves in a trice, and another spell got rid of the lingering smoke.
Harry hadn't been quite one hundred percent clear on how this worked, but Miss Nym cleared it up nicely by telling him that Su had done two duels and had "most certainly" done well enough to pass. Harry would be staying around for long enough to have a second duel against one of his classmates, and apparently there was some sort of way of handling it at the ends involving a duel between the first and the last person.
Electing to put his wand back on his tail to start with, Harry looked around to see if there was a good place to start, then decided to just stand somewhere near the middle of the room and see what happened.
The next student to come in was Theodore Nott, one of the Slytherins, and he gave Harry an interested look before pulling his wand from his pocket.
Miss Nym repeated the bit about bowing to one another and not using any spells that could hurt the other person, and Harry bowed (though Theo only just bowed).
"Begin," Miss Nym said, and Theo pointed his wand.
"Incendio!" he called, and Harry brought up his wing to block. The jet of fire magic splashed off the tough surface of his wing, and he frowned for a moment.
"Miss?" he asked. "Does doing this lose points?"
"That's for me to know and you to find out," Miss Nym replied. "Oh, you're not flammable, right?"
"Don't think so," Harry told her.
"Incendio!" Theo incanted again, and this time the spell was aimed for Harry's feet instead. It made a little scorch mark on the floor and set the hem of his robes on fire, and Harry decided he was probably better off on the move instead of blocking.
"Ictus," he called, firing a Stinging Jinx, and Theo blocked it with his wand.
It was actually really interesting to watch. Harry had heard about spell blocking but never actually seen it before, and it looked like a useful skill to learn. It seemed to involve waving the wand like it was a sword you were using to parry a sword blow, or possibly like it was a lightsaber and you were a Jedi, but there was probably more to it than that.
Maybe it would be better to call it parrying?
"Is that all you've got, Potter?" Theo demanded. "Flipendo!"
His Knockback Jinx hit one of the tables pushed against the wall, bouncing it off the wall itself and knocking it forwards with a bang, and Harry jumped behind it to use it as a shield.
Switching his wand to his paw to aim better, Harry used a Disarming Charm, but Theo fired a fire-making spell at about the same time and the two jets of magic bounced off one another with a shower of sparks. The fire spell hit a shield that Miss Nym had put up around herself, and the Disarming Charm thumped into one of the other desks.
Harry wondered whether he should do his smokescreen thing again, getting some time to think by casting more Stinging Jinxes – it was a very easy spell – and the third or fourth one actually got past Theo's ability to parry because he messed it up somehow. Theo yelped, then scowled, and set the table Harry was hiding behind on fire.
"That's not proper duelling, Potter!" Theo called. "You can't hide like that!"
Harry was fairly sure that you could… but then he thought about what a formal duel was probably like and how it took place somewhere that wasn't a classroom.
The only times you'd have something to hide behind in an open room would be if you conjured it yourself… so maybe Theo was right about that.
Switching his wand back to his tail, Harry crouched and then took off with a flap of his wings. Theo's next spell (a Flipendo knockback jinx) went wide, missing completely, and Harry landed on one of the still-upright tables before hopping to the next and then the next.
"Stupefy!" he called, and Theo ducked – avoiding the stun spell instead of parrying it, which was interesting, but then Harry had run out of classroom the way he was going and jumped to push off the wall and go back the other way.
"Incendio!" the Slytherin boy retaliated, getting back to his feet. "Incendio! Incendio!"
He turned to Miss Nym. "Why haven't you said I've won yet?"
"I'm actually wondering that myself," Harry had to admit, looking at the scorch marks and holes burned in his robes. "I've clearly been hit."
"Most of what you've done so far is set a dragon on fire," Miss Nym pointed out, sounding amused. "Besides, this ain't an exam where whoever wins goes through. It's how well you do."
Nott scowled, turning back to Harry, and flicked his wand. "Expelliarmus!"
Harry blocked with his wing, then inhaled.
"Hey, you can't set me on fire!" Theo protested.
"Aguamneti!" Harry mumbled, exhaling at the same time, and instead of fire what came out was a blast of water which splashed into Theo as he flinched away from what he thought was going to be flame breath. There was a lot of it, partly because Harry found out that he had a bit of trouble turning the water breath off again, and once he'd finally stopped he pointed his wand.
"Expelliarmus!" he called, just as Theo rolled over onto his side and called out "Wingardium Leviosa!"
Theo's wand went flying out of his hand, but Harry's wand lifted from where he had it and went up into the air as well. The burly Slytherin stumbled to his feet, grabbing for Harry's wand, and got hold of it as it landed again.
"And that's enough!" Miss Nym said. "Well done both of you, though Mr. Nott might want to think about not damaging his next opponent's robes."
She used a mending charm to fix the scorch marks in Harry's clothes, as well as his glasses – which Harry hadn't even realized had been smashed by one of the Flipendo spells – and dried the floor as well as Theo with another spell.
"And, for the record, Mr. Nott," Miss Nym went on, "I'll be counting the times you cast a spell which Mr. Potter didn't block with his wings fully, but all your hits will count for something because they would have worked much better against someone who wasn't a dragon."
After grumbling for a moment, Theo had to admit that that sounded fair, and Harry agreed.
"Oh, and Mr. Potter," she concluded. "My compliments to whoever decided you should learn a difficult charm like the water-making charm so early. As a dragon I can see it would be particularly useful for you."
Harry hadn't known it was such a difficult spell, but he had to admit he could see why Remus had focused on that one.
It was quite a wait for everyone else to finish the duels bit of the exam. With forty people in their year that meant forty duels, and even though each one only took a few minutes that still meant it was most of the afternoon.
"I wonder what that exam's like for the other years," Ron said, as he slumped into an armchair in the Gryffindor common room. "Like Fred and George."
"Would they be allowed to take it together?" Hermione wondered. "I imagine they do a lot better when they're working together."
"It'd be a bit unfair for whoever they were battling," Ron shrugged. "Even if there were two other people they were duelling instead of one, those two people wouldn't be as good as Fred and George."
"But is that really a good argument?" Neville asked. "At some point it stops being an unfair advantage and starts being like a fair advantage. Someone with really good memory has an unfair advantage in theory exams because they remember everything more easily, but that doesn't mean they should get harder questions."
He frowned. "But… hmm, it's kind of tricky… because it seems unfair for someone to be marked down for some things."
"I've heard that in America they sometimes use something called grading on a curve," Dean volunteered. "It means that if there's someone really smart in your class it can actually mean everybody else gets lower marks because of it."
They all contemplated that.
"You're probably glad we don't do that, Hermione," Ron said. "Everyone would blame you for their marks."
"Us four do sort of blame Hermione for our marks anyway," Harry pointed out. "It's the good kind of blame though."
"I think the word is credit," Neville said.
"Actually, how did your duel go?" Dean asked. "I don't think we got around to the bit where we talked about those yet. Mostly because Ron wasn't finished."
"It's not my fault I got picked nearly last," Ron pointed out. "It was probably random or something."
He shrugged. "Anyway, it wasn't anything special. I ducked around a lot, we threw spells at one another, and I won one and lost one."
"You can't leave it at that," Dean insisted, pointing at Ron. "Really, you can't. Did you do anything cool? Did they do anything cool?"
"Well, I did use the bluebell flames spell," Ron said, thinking about it. "I tried to make a field of fire that I could hide in, but it didn't work because my robes are black and the fire was bright blue."
Harry could see how that would be a problem. It was sort of like the opposite of setting yourself on fire in a dark room, if you didn't think about it too hard.
"Well, obviously you know what to do better in future," Hermione told him.
"How did yours go, Hermione?" Harry asked.
"I decided that the best thing to do would be to get really very good at a few spells," Hermione answered. "And to have a good selection of other spells for unusual situations. But I made sure I could do the Shield Charm very well, and also the Stunning Charm, and that seemed to work quite well for my battle with Ernie Macmillan. I had a bit more trouble with Draco Malfoy, though."
"You had Draco?" Neville said. "What did he do?"
"He cast a very odd spell and made a snake appear," she said. "I'd never heard of that spell before, but it worried me until I worked out that it probably wasn't actually going to attack me."
"But snakes are vicious, aren't they?" Ron asked, deeply confused.
"No, they're not," Hermione replied. "Haven't you ever been to the zoo? They're mostly quite torpid creatures."
"I don't think it'd be safe to take the Weasleys to the zoo," Dean said. "Can you imagine Fred and George trying to tease the crocodiles?"
"...fair point," Hermione admitted. "Sorry."
"It's okay, I was mostly thinking about Ashwinders and stuff," Ron said. "They're really dangerous because they set everything on fire."
Dean turned to Neville. "What about you?"
"Oh, I… didn't really do very well," Neville said. "Justin said it was okay, but he had to go to Madam Pomfrey afterwards..."
Ron blinked. "Did someone turn over two pages at once?"
Neville rubbed his knuckles. "I couldn't get the Disarming Charm working, so I panicked and punched him..."
They thought about that for a bit.
"It'll probably be okay," Ron guessed. "She put Charlie back together after he got bitten by a Manticore in NEWT Care of Magical Creatures, a broken nose or whatever will be fine."
Dean went next, explaining how he'd relied on a trick where he cast spells at the floor, and that had made big explosions which kept his opponent guessing but eventually Daphne had got him with a Leg-Locker Jinx and won that way. He'd managed to beat Vincent Crabbe, though he said it was mostly luck.
When Harry explained how he'd done, it turned out that everyone was quite impressed. Which was probably a good sign.
None of them were really sure how they should go from there, though, except that Neville wondered if he should just learn how to conjure a big padded wooden bat and a shield and fight that way.
"Well, Potions tomorrow," Ron said, once they'd finally finished with that line of conversation. "Which is going to be pretty bad, if you ask me."
"Potions is all right," Dean frowned. "It's not great, yeah, but usually we do okay."
"That's the thing, it's not going to be the two of us," Ron explained. "It's going to be you doing your own potion, and me doing my own potion. We've been doing teamwork with these potions all year and now we have to do them solo."
That sounded like a good point to Harry. It was sort of like the handicap thing again, only worse because there really wasn't much of a way to get extra Potions practice in the middle of the year without brewing some in the toilets or something.
Maybe he should ask Professor Snape about it next year? Or maybe when Percy was next around he'd ask the Prefect about how they did NEWT Potions – was that a solo thing rather than a two-person thing?
Sometimes Harry wanted to see what the National Curriculum looked like for teaching magic, but then he remembered that Hogwarts was the only school in the first place so there wasn't much point in having a National Curriculum.