A new week began.
The Hogwarts students below fifth year faced their judgment.
Douglas took the theory scores of the two houses that had sat the same paper and compared them.
He let the Ravenclaw students see how many of them had fallen short of Hufflepuff. Of course, they also saw how many had outperformed the Hufflepuff students, but no one felt proud of that.
The Ravenclaw students who had done poorly lowered their heads in silence.
The same thing happened with Hufflepuff, but their reaction was the opposite. They only noticed the few who had scored better than most Ravenclaws, while the majority paid no attention whatsoever to having scored worse than Ravenclaw's lowest-scoring student.
This forced Douglas to use both the carrot and the stick, spending half a lesson laboriously hoodwinking... teaching them before most developed some desire to improve.
Things were somewhat different with Gryffindor and Slytherin. Apart from Hermione, that walking cheat, the other students' scores were almost the same.
Of course, the few who had been tricked into scoring zero did not count. Douglas simply made them memorize the entire paper and write it out from memory.
Finally, Douglas even posted the monthly score sheets for every house in every year on the blackboard at the back of the Defense Against Dark Magic classroom.
Beside them were several large words: [210 days until the O.W.L.s!]
And that number changed every day.
It gave every student entering the Defense Against Dark Magic classroom a sense of urgency.
Those who suffered most were not the fifth years, but the sixth years who had only finished their O.W.L.s a few months earlier.
Seeing those words seemed to send them straight back to the torment of the run-up to their exams.
Some students' hair even stood on end at