Chapter 6 #2
The opportunity to prove she knew what she was doing arrived two days later.
She had downloaded year-appropriate practice tests from the MSE website and decided they would be the best way to rip the Band-Aid off and evaluate where her students were with regard to what they were supposed to be learning.
Her first class of the day was first-years, who wouldn’t need to do their MSEs for another year yet and felt less pressure about them.
Still, the pop quiz did not go over well.
She gritted her teeth and promised herself that this was a normal student response to any unplanned exam.
She had hated pop quizzes herself. She couldn’t believe she was delivering them.
Of course, her students felt like she was trying to catch them out, rather than using these tests as a barometer to gauge their level of preparedness, which she did try to explain briefly before realizing they didn’t care about her explanation.
She could do what she wanted. She was the teacher.
They weren’t going to agree with her that it made sense.
Reassuring her wasn’t their job and she couldn’t reasonably expect it from them. Though she secretly planned to use this as an excuse to stop by Amelia’s office later for external validation. (She shouldn’t need validation … but she kind of did anyway.)
Right now, she just needed to get through this first period and the rest of the day. And grade all the tests. And figure out what the results of those tests meant for the rest of the year.
As she watched the students bend over their papers, scribbling furiously, she saw a couple of suspicious things.
A few glances at cell phones. When she’d gone to school here, cell phones weren’t even allowed.
A few glances at smartwatches (ditto). Were they cheating somehow?
Could they cheat on an unplanned test? But of course they could cheat on an unplanned test. She would have figured out how if she had been the kind of kid who had ever even thought about cheating.
But she hadn’t needed to; she’d liked being good at school and derived arguably too much of her self-esteem from that skill set.
Add that to the list of things she’d need to examine in some nebulous later, when she wasn’t super stressed out about pretty much everything.
She made a note of which students seemed to be accessing their electronic devices and shuffled those particular tests to the top of the pile to grade as she was waiting for the next class to complete their own.
Sure enough, those students got almost perfect scores. A few of them got literally perfect scores. On a pop quiz for which they hadn’t prepared, and they weren’t students who had in any other way distinguished themselves.
She glanced up in time to see another student in her second class sliding a cell phone out from under the desk, glancing at it, then writing something down.
Curiouser and curiouser. Or maybe not that curious after all.
She spent the rest of that period coming up with a spell to prevent potential cheating via electronic devices.
It was fairly straightforward—she was good at spells that interacted with technology, and this one was a very basic disabling charm, which she could cast roughly on the room at large, affecting all nearby devices.
No student in her class would be able to connect to either the Wi-Fi or the cellular network.
In this case it would also affect her own phone and laptop, but she’d design exceptions later; this was a quick and dirty job just to hopefully disprove her suspicions.
She cast it discreetly before handing out the tests for her third-period class, which was indeed the MSE class.
Second-years, fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds starting to think about their futures.
Bryn remembered it as an exciting time, when the end of high school was just appearing in the distance and life afterwards held potential without being quite near enough to overwhelm.
This time, as she watched, she could see even more students pulling out phones and checking watches.
One even tapped on what seemed to be an extra-thick pair of glasses, as if frustrated.
AI glasses? Was that a thing? Actually, it was definitely a thing.
She could probably program a pair of those glasses to look at a test and pop up the correct answers.
Certainly the students were capable of doing so.
More restlessness. More shuffling. More frustrated looks around. Less test answering. Bryn’s heart sank as she collected the papers at the end of the period.
This time the results were significantly lower.
She considered this. It had now been six weeks since Professor Herringbone had died.
Were these kids six weeks behind, or were they quite a bit more behind than that?
Some of them had failed the exam entirely.
The professor wouldn’t have let people get away with cheating; surely that was just a thing they were doing to take advantage of the new teacher?
Except that Professor Herringbone had sat at her desk during exams, scribbling away, working on her own research.
Probably writing some of those incredibly clever, incredibly hard-to-decipher books that had built her professional reputation.
Nothing like Bryn’s silly little spell books for merely average witches.
But then again, when had the school allowed the use of phones?
Would Professor Herringbone have twigged to just how much they could do by opening their camera apps, pointing at the test, and waiting for the internet to supply an answer?
Would she have known that they had the answers to any test question at their fingertips? Probably not.
Which opened up a lot more questions. Had they been doing this all year? In fact, were they doing this in all their classes?
She sighed and sat back in her chair, trying to remember what the format of the MSEs had been.
When she was in school, the exams had been held at Grimoire Academy, but they’d been proctored by people from the Magical Scholarly Association, which was a national body that monitored all such exams in the country, and which worked in concert with similar bodies all over the world to ensure that wherever someone came from, their education was supplying essentially the same material.
She clearly remembered there being anti-cheating spells enacted, though back then that was to keep anyone from bringing in outside notes or carefully writing answers on their forearms. What was the likelihood that those spells would also include the use of technology?
High, she decided. Very high. Grimoire Academy might be a bit behind times with regard to cell phones, but she suspected the MSA folks were not. They likely had quite clever anti-cheating spells, much more sophisticated than what she’d managed on the fly between periods.
This probably did not bode well. What even were the consequences for attempting to cheat on the MSEs? Not good, for sure. Possibly even negatively affecting the school’s reputation. She performed the same charm for her next three classes, and all three also did worse than the control groups.
Rats. She was going to have to tell Amelia. This was really not the excuse to have a casual, maybe even slightly flirtatious, conversation with the headmistress that she had so been hoping for.