The arrival of exam week also meant that the full moon was nearly upon them once more.
This time, Lupin didn't request leave a week in advance. Instead, he took a special potion from Douglas and drank it daily—each dose helping to smooth out his hidden bouts of irritability.
Meanwhile, Lupin had made some… creative adjustments to the obstacle course: he added swamps, thick fog, and dense thickets, each teeming with various Dark creatures. Most importantly, the difficulty of the fitness test didn't vary by year—all students faced the same challenges, no exceptions.
During a fifth-year lesson, Douglas offered some advice:
"For written exams, don't just settle for rote memorization or thinking you 'sort of know' how to answer. You need to analyze the bigger picture—look for patterns in the way questions are set and the range of topics covered. Remember, the Wizarding Examinations Authority barely ever changes staff…
Everything in this world has its own logic, and this set of O.W.L.s practice materials contains all the real questions from fifth and seventh years across the decades. Inside, you'll find the habits of professional examiners, each teacher's question-setting style, which points have been tested and which haven't…
So I hope each of you will keep a separate piece of parchment to record common question types, point values, and so on—ideally in a table. When you review, you can swap notes and have a clear direction…
And of course, the same applies to practical exams."
Douglas's intention was simple: ever since the O.W.L.s materials became available, some students thought they could just memorize the majority of those questions and skip revisiting their first- through fifth-year textbooks. He wanted them to study smarter, not lazier.
He didn't expect, however, that his words would send some students down a very different path—obsessively analyzing the patterns of the O.W.L.s questions.
Some students developed genuinely useful strategies: process of elimination, cause-and-effect reasoning, spotting keywords, identifying commonalities, or contradictions. They even worked out which topics the examiners liked to revisit in short-answer questions.
But others went off the deep end, inventing elaborate multiple-choice guessing techniques: "Option A almost never shows up; if three out of four options are basically the same, pick the odd one out; and when all else fails—just divine it!"
When Douglas heard about these antics, he could only laugh wryly. Students in every world, it seemed, came up with the same tricks.
Thankfully, he hadn't overheard the infamous Muggle guessing rhyme: "If three long and one short, pick the shortest; three short and one long, pick the longest; two long, two short, pick B; all the same, pick A; all different, pick D; if it's a mess, C is best." Otherwise, he'd have started suspecting there was an exchange student from the Far East lurking among the little wizards.
He wasn't the only one aware of the situation. The other professors soon caught wind of it, though most dismissed such behavior with disdain.
Professor Snape declared in class, "Potions results are never achieved by guessing. If anyone tries that in my exam, they'll be thrown out of the classroom."
Professor McGonagall added, "Even if you guess right this time, do you plan to guess your way through life?"
Only Professor Trelawney of Divination, when asked if she could foresee the answers, replied, "It is not we who choose fate, but fate that chooses us."
As for Douglas, he kept his thoughts to himself. After all, wizards relying on intuition to guess answers—well, that was practically magic. Who's to say they wouldn't get lucky?
So, quietly, he made a few changes to the multiple-choice section of the first-year exam: Gryffindor's correct answers were all "A," except for question 10, which was "D." Slytherin's were all "B," with question 10 as "C." Ravenclaw got "C"s, question 10 "A." Hufflepuff got "D"s, question 10 "B." And then he shuffled the order for each year.
The goal? To make students doubt everything—even if their magical "intuition" led them to the right answer, he wanted them to start questioning their own magical instincts.
In short, those who knew the material hesitated, those who didn't couldn't guess right. A small exercise in building psychological resilience.
After the first day's Defence Against the Dark Arts theory exam, nearly every student in every house was left questioning reality.
Gryffindor Common Room
"Hermione, I only realized after I finished—I picked 'C' five times in a row…"
"I did it nine times…"
"Haha, then you're doomed. There's no way the Professor would set it up like that. I picked 'B' for the third question, just in case."
…
Ravenclaw Tower
"I don't know what happened. I got halfway through and realized all my answers were 'C.' I checked three times—I'm sure I didn't mess up…"
"Wait, weren't they all supposed to be 'C'? After I saw the first six were 'C,' I figured it was another one of Professor Holmes's tricks. Didn't even bother reading the rest—just filled in 'C' for all of them."
"Oh no, I answered 'A' for one…"
In the Defence Against the Dark Arts office, Sirius was helping to grade the exams.
"Douglas, you're going to drive these kids mad. I love it!"
This month's theory exam left students in existential crisis for a week.
The seventh-year Defence Against the Dark Arts students caught on immediately—this had to be a new teaching tactic from the Professor.
A few seventh-years, who'd helped maintain the fifth-year spell-breaking corridor, decided to try a similar trick. They set up one section of the corridor so that every trap spell was the same—except for the fifth and sixth, which were disguised counter-curses.
Any student who breezed through the first few would instinctively try the same counter-curse again—and promptly fall into the trap.
When Douglas found out, he gave them a stern talking-to:
"The point of the spell-breaking corridor is to help students truly master a variety of spells and counter-curses. What you're doing is pointless. Go figure out how to disguise different spells as the same spell, so students will have to learn to tell the real from the fake as they break through. Our goal here is education, not entertainment!"
Still, he didn't make them change back the traps they'd already set.
When a leader gives an order, the underlings run themselves ragged.
Disguising different spells as the same spell is no easy feat—it requires a deep, nuanced understanding of magic.
With a single sentence, Douglas had given those seventh-years a mountain of Charms homework. After all, the spell-breaking corridor covered a dizzying array of magic.
Professor Flitwick was so intrigued by the topic that he invited Douglas to join his Charms Club to research it together.
When Douglas received the invitation, he could only sigh. The pit he'd dug for others had finally caught up with him.
And so, in the tense atmosphere of exams, the students of Hogwarts welcomed their first trip to Hogsmeade of the term, the Halloween feast—and the looming full moon of werewolf Lupin…
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