Transfiguration NEWTs
Madam Griselda Marchbanks lifted the NEWT transfiguration exam papers with a sigh and hoped that they would be a little more erudite than last year's offerings.
There were certain points that an examiner looked for on any paper to give credit to a student; and often tried hard to extract what the student meant rather than what they had said, though at NEWT any student ought to be beyond rambling. It was a pity too many of them were NOT beyond rambling.
The first question called for an analysis of why it was harder to summon matter than pure energy. It was a point so many students struggled with, even though even muggles acknowledged that there was no significant difference in terms of the laws of the universe between matter and energy; once one had grasped that, the concept that energy had to be coalesced to produce matter, which required energy to be used in the coalescence became relatively simple. It was too why summoned items also dissipated back into the energy from which they had come without complex, post-NEWT permanencing magic.
Griselda Marchbanks reflected dryly that this was why few dark wizards were actually REALLY good; because they took shortcuts because they wanted something for nothing; they failed to bother to understand the fundamental laws and so found summoning energy to destroy much easier than creating. Muggles had another parallel; those who scrawled foul words on walls because they could not create things with their clumsy manual methods. But any idiot could make uncontrolled expressions of energy like bluebell flames, accidentally setting fire to their classroom; and according to young Minerva they all too frequently did so.
She sighed as she underlined the few – the all too few – good points made by the students; and put a dotted line under a rather muddled sentence that claimed that bunnies were made from sunlight because they ate grass and grass grew because the sun shone on it and it took an awful lot of sunlight to grow a bunny. Essentially it was a correct answer but it might have been phrased more cogently, even if the analogy was quite a good one. She passed to the next paper and beamed as she marked several bonus marks on the paper with arithmantic notes on the use of energy; really post NEWT in scope, an excellent student.
The next section dealt with the theory of cross-species switches and other obvious changes. What Madam Marchbanks was looking for was the term 'Assimilative Correlation' which had its own subsections; Assimilative Correlation by Nomenclature dealt with using similarities between names to facilitate a change in the mind of the transfigurationist, such as the old Guinea-fowl to Guinea-pig switch. Assimilative Correlation by Association was the one most students either picked up straight away or had trouble assimilating; the concept that similarities between two creatures or a creature and an object might be sought to make a change. The classic example of this was an owl transfigured to opera glasses focussing on the staring eyes of the owl; owl to Persian cat also came under this. Or as one student had written – which had to be disallowed as an exemplar – anyone with the surname Goyle to pig.
Extra marks might be given to anyone who cited the third main discipline of Assimilative Correlation, that by Cultural Reference; easily overlooked but of great importance, and of course very individual. And how nicely put by this student; 'The concept of turning pairs of rabbits into slippers is paradigmatic of Assimilative Correlation by Cultural Reference'. That was an 'O' grade answer for THAT question. Ah, it was the same student who had strayed into Arithmancy; not really surprising. Students who threw words like 'paradigmatic' around almost had to be those who went the extra mile in all their studies.
The third and final long section covered Gamp. The students were required to list Gamp's exceptions to the Law of Elemental Conjuration and then pick one to explain. This was almost always where students fell down.
The list SHOULD be obvious if one only understood the theory; that nothing could be conjured that was innately magical, that one could not understand, or that required permanence to count. Gamp's exceptions were a simplification of the theory of course; but sometimes things had to be broken down until higher levels of comprehension were attained.
Alas, not all the students managed all five; and some got them wrong. What were they thinking of? The exceptions were of course Sentient Life, Magical Artefacts, Completed Potions, Information and Food. Some had written merely 'life' – forgetting such spells as serpensortia – rather than recalling it was the sentience of the lifeform that counted; because as one could not summon what one did not fundamentally understand, whilst one might frame the form of an animal, one could not frame the huristic sentience of a complex being. This too was the reason one could not summon information; one might conjure a printed page of which one knew the contents; but no NEW information might be summoned. Magical Artefacts and Completed Potions were of course also too complex to summon because the energy required to make the magical changes to them was even more drastic than the extra energy needed to summon matter; Griselda Marchbanks shuddered to think of the levels of energy involved, far past the effort of actually just MAKING the things. Beverages were different of course; though they too were subject to dissipation over time without a complex piece of permanency. Which brought one to food; food summoned would dissipate once eaten and, because of the time lag, this would be while it was undergoing digestion at the cellular level, which brought dangers of rapidly dropping blood sugars and consequent serious illness to anyone who ate it. The level of expended energy to place a permanence on such was likely to be more than the calorific value of the food; unless one was capable of the extremely advanced ritual that permitted the drawing of energy from the surroundings rather than from within. No schoolchild was commonly capable of that however; the reason that they were fed so well in school, because of the extraordinary expenditure of energy in casting spells at the concentrated level necessary for learning.
Poor Mr Gamp!
HOW they had mangled his exceptions and the meanings behind them; though there were some glimmers of understanding.
Had her star pupil here managed better? Ah yes; an excellent essay on the understanding required to produce information; and what a shame so model a student had written 'Life' not 'Sentient Life' in the list of exceptions. Ah well, a few marks dropped for that would not drop the student out of an 'O' grade' so long as the short answers were to the same standard.
Madam Marchbanks summoned a cup of tea – the temperature in her office dropped imperceptibly as she drew on the surroundings to make it permanent because she NEEDED the amount of sugar she had loaded it with – and turned to the second paper.