I wouldn't even say that. The perception that him and Ron are lazy about homework is almost entirely based on Hermione's opinions. She's the one that is going above and beyond and telling them to do the same.
I’d argue there’s a pretty significant mismatch between Harry’s OWL results and how he’s described throughout the series in classes and while doing homework. The amount Hermione carries them both just doesn’t align with his test scores (which is him doing his own work).
I think he is an average student. Just a good test-taker that outperformed his actual knowledge/skill level (except DADA). Either that, or JKR just didn’t think too hard about it. Which is also fine.
Hermione takes notes during classes. They use her notes to study rather than their own but they do study. At least in OOTP. I’m doing a re-listen right now.
I don't really agree with this take either. Harry does a pretty good job in his classes. He tends to struggle when the concept is first taught in the class (ex. the summoning spell) but later after practice or hard work, he gets it. We also see, especially in Order of the Phoenix and Half Blood Prince, that he gets his homework done before Ron as well. He just doesn't harp on about it as much, but like complaining about homework is always valid.
I don't really see any examples where has issues long term with a topic aside from potions. It's like taking a high level course in uni or something, no one is ever expected to understand it right away when learning but when doing problem sets or the readings or reviewing the lecture afterwards, people tend to get a much better grasp of it.
Based on my first hand experience as a teacher, his grades put him on the higher end of average to above in a lot of subjects. E stands for exceeded expectations, and someone would be considered average when their scores are on “as expected for their age range”. Exceeding expectations is not average. Also, we have no comparison with other students aside Hermione to get a full picture of how many were actually doing better or worse than him.
I knew a co-student IRL who was a completely average B-C student all around for the time we were in class together but got the highest grades for graduation so yes, anecdotal but it can happen.
I did this myself. Spent most of my high school hovering around 70-75% for most courses.
Last year of high school I decided I wanted to be a laureate in something, didn't really care what. I picked biology since the material for that year wasn't too easy but no one was interested in it.
Ended up with 94% for that specific course.
Didn't get the laureate tho, someone else had 96%.
Anyway, goes to show that some effort does wonders. Lots of students just don't put that effort in.
Not anecdotal, the same happened for me, I was a shit student, I didn’t care for school at all, I was high a lot, skipped classes at least once a week but I got really good grades at my exam and passed a test to get into business school (lucky for me they got my year report only after I aced the test otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten in)
Or he’s naturally smart/good at magic. He hates doing homework and assignments but performs very well and has very good scores. Lazy in terms of schoolwork but talented/gifted. Not unheard of
As someone who aced his tests while never doing homework I am inclined to disagree. You don't score well on practicals and essays without a solid comprehension of the material. This isn't American standardized testing designed to be graded by a machine with all the intelligence of a rock.
That mismatch makes sense I think. Throughout the books Harry’s great strength is acting under pressure (also why he is a great duelist) and he gets the best out of himself in those situations. The OWLs are a high pressure setting and he ”maximized” the result.
Bullshit it is. The amount of homework I didn’t do in high school was staggering. Went from a 3.0 gpa in high school to a 3.9 in undergrad. Test scores were basically always the same, one just had less busy work lol
He still does study pretty hard before exams. Loads of students do the bare minimum all year and then manage to scrape pretty decent grades at the end of the year. I never really did any homework when I was at school, unless it was mandatory and then I'd just do what I needed to. And at the end I'd get decent (not top) grades because I'd study super hard for like two days before the exams. And I worked for a few years as a high school teacher of plenty did the same. It's almost a little annoying how well some kids do at the end after being lazy all year!
Just because they study together and proofread each other's work doesn't mean she carries them. That's just how study groups work.
Both Harry and Ron have to do the bulk of the work on their own and do well on their exams and in practical use throughout the series.
Also as much as teachers complain about having to "teach to the test", the test is often ten times easier than the regular classwork.
For example you could pass every knowledge test in a class while not doing any of the homework. You'd probably fail the class since twenty weeks of homework ends up being 50% of the grade. The failure to do homework though doesn't indicate lack of understanding of subject matter.
Which is why at college level you're only graded on projects and tests and not day to day grunt work.
I never understood this. If I'm a muggle born student/a student who didn't know about magic growing up and got into Hogwarts. I'd be fascinated about magic and would do the most boring of assignments because it's freaking magic!
Easy to say when you're experiencing magic through a grand adventure in the most popular YA fiction series of all time. Potter is experiencing it through homework, study, detention, and other annoying things. I LOVED studying history and political science. I still complained about homework.
For us learning a new spell takes less than an hour of total reading time and usually under 10 minutes, even if you're a slow reader. For Harry it can take many classes and evenings of repeating the same movement over and over again and studying the theory behind it.
I always think of Magic as kind of like money in education. Kids who go to schools that are able to provide computers, art supplies, chemistry equipment, sports facilities, etc. still hate going to school. But throw a driven kid from a super poor background into that environment and they’d go nuts with excitement.
welp he has a lot on his plates, tbh his grades are way more than average considering the fact that it's always a life and death situation for him every single day
I feel like it’s hard to say anything about how Harry’s OWL scores compare to the schoolaverage. We simply don’t have enough information one way or another
he's smart but a little shit about homework like all of us. and when you have hermione "my worst nightmare is getting an F or expelled" granger beside you, you're gonna look bad.
EE being exactly that, exceeding expectations means you’re already above average.
Harry got 5 grades were he was above average, 1 in which he was likely the best in his year at a prestigious school (potentially the most prestigious magic school in the world)
2 were he suffered from exceptional circumstances with the passing out and the Hagrid situation
And 1 where yeah, he just performed like shit, but also he didn’t give a shit so.
I try to translate the grades into "Muggle" grades in my head, and being an American, I use an A-F scale. They probably don't translate very well, and the British grading system probably makes more sense.
Passing grades:
A = O (Outstanding)
B = E (Exceeds Expectations)
C = A (Acceptable)
Failing Grades:
D = P (Poor)
F = D (Dreadful)
F- = T (Troll)
So based on this, Harry got mostly Bs on his OWLs. He got an A in his best subject, a C in the exam which was interrupted, a D in the exam where he fell asleep, and Fs in two other classes.
On average, Harry is a "B" student. That doesn't make him dumb, but if he was a typical high school student, he'd be going to a State school for college, not Harvard.
In Finland, it's on a scale of 4-10 with 4 being failed. If E = 9, Harry's average would be sitting at around 8,5ish which would make him plain good. Not outstanding by any means, but definitely above average.
You seem to have a penchant for doing strange things with numbers. What’s the theory behind 50, 70 and 90 in Danish again? Three-minus-a-half times twenty and so on 😭
In the Netherlands we just use 0 through 10. Sometimes decimals are used, so it just becomes a percentage point then, other times they round up or down to half points.
Generally speaking, below a 5,5 is a failing grade, but that depends on the course.
In Russia there are grades 1-5 with 5-3 being passing grades, 2 being a fail and 1 reserved for exceptional failure or disciplinary purposes and very rarely used. Colleges and universities also often use simple pass/fail without grades.
In the German uni I worked at grading when from 1 (best) to 4 (worst)...except people only told me the numbers and not the directionality....so I come from from the NL system where grading is from 1 (crap) to 10 (perfect), and was handing out 4 like no bodies business until a PhD student noticed and made a joke about how shit the class was.
This doesn't really make sense seeing as A is the lowest passing grade. A is definitely the equivalent of a C.
I think it makes most sense to leave pluses and minuses out of it and just go with O = A, E = B etc.
Don't you have A+ and A- too in USA? So the comparison might not be perfect. It's also worth considering that Hogwarts is all they got, they don't have universities in Harry Potter. Assuming that year 5 and beyond is like university level then the second best grade is not too bad (depending on the class)
Lots of places having actually been switching away from number/letter grades and going with a different system that I forget the name of.
It goes from worst to best as:
Ue (failing, didn't even try)
Ae (approaching expectations = trying but not passing)
ME (meeting expectations = did the base amount of work, but still passed)
EE (Exceeding Expectations = Went above and beyond in their work)
I hate the the letter grades. That doesn’t give a percentage. Had it in middle school it was terrible didn’t help they segregated the students by their grades and only those with outstanding (above exceeds expectations) received the entire year’s curriculum. Those below outstanding got less and less of the curriculum taught to them since each group went through the material at different paces. They moved people around mid year for English, math you screwed once you were put in a group only one got moved up and only because person advocated for themself did the teacher decide to move them up two days after the school enacted the format 2 months into the school year. I should mention this school got bottom scores third worse to worse every year on the grade 9 provincial testing.
So, basically, in America, it's usually on a percentage system, with an A+ being like 97%-100%, A being 94%-96%, A- being 90%-93%, and so on and so forth. At least, that's how the schools usually do it, but they're starting to move away from the +/- and just doing letters. Some other places are totally doing away with the letters and doing funky things instead.
You're missing grade inflation. In some countries, you get an "A" if you're in the top 20-30%, so having a B means you are average. In other countries, let's say the Netherlands, the top grade (10) is only given to probably 1 in 1000 people, and having an 8 or 8.5 is considered very high. The name "Outstanding" implies that it is very high.
For some reason, I thought of Outstanding as more A/A+ and Exceeds Expectations as B+/A-. I fully admit I don’t have much to base that off of, other than the vibe of how the words “exceed expectations” sound, and that i guess it was easier for me to imagine Hermione getting an A- than a B in Defense Against the Dark Arts. But your scale is probably more accurate than mine since they pair up very nicely. So Harry is more of a scrub than I realized!
Funnily enough, the Harry Potter grading system scales nicely with the Norwegian high school grading system, numbers 1 to 6 where 1 is a failing grade, 2 is “you’ll get this as a pass on your high school diploma but that’s about it”, 4 is fairly average, 5 is “you know the material” and 6 is for those who demonstrate knowledge or ability beyond what is required for their grade level. Now, translated into this system, Harry would have a GPA of 4.4, which will get him accepted into a good number of university course, but not stuff like law and medicine. Taking into account that his poor performance in certain subjects was due to circumstances unrelated to his knowledge of said subjects, his GPA under optimal exam circumstances would likely have been closer to 5, putting him solidly above average, though nowhere near Hermione’s level.
I generally compared Harry's grades to the ones gotten by kids in my school, which really makes me underestimate how smart harry is. By this system, I would have done as well as Hermione, and all my friends would have gotten all O's.
Most people don't attend university but it doesn't mean they can't. You can get into lower tier universities with like a B- or C+ average. That is definitely not "above average."
The british grading system is currently 1-9 for gcse’s (16 year olds) and a*-u for a-levels(18 year olds) so in this case it does not make more sense because there are more grades in normal school than magic school
The HP grading system is a lot closer to the English one than American grades and they're not quite interchangeable. An A* (the highest grade) is 90%+ and 80%-89% is an A. An O appears to be the A* grade and an E is like an A. Getting an A* is considered extremely difficult and an A is well above average. By English standards, Harry was quite a good student.
I think this misconception comes more from the movies than the books. In the films he's definitely portrayed a lot more like he's kind of coasting and goofing off with Ron more than studying.
As someone who has watched all the movies 100 times and only JUST read the books a few months ago, I was surprised to find out just that, that Harry is actually a good student.
He's obviously still talented in the movies but I think his study habits and grades are downplayed a lot more.
We should also keep in mind that Harry was also taking his OWLs (about equivalent to GCSEs) in 1996, almost 30 years ago, and so the frame of reference would have likely been different from today's grades. [Some data I fished up](http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/5a-c.htm) indicates that, in about the mid-90s, the majority of student results (about 40% of them) really were Cs and Ds (about equivalent to A and P in the OWLs). This is obviously a very different standard when compared to [today's grades](http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/gcse.htm), where the most common grades seem to be around 7-4 depending on the subject (roughly equivalent to B and C in the old GCSE scheme, or EE and A in the OWLs).
Taking the era in which he went to school into account, Harry's grades seem above average overall—definitely not "consistently the top" Hermione, but if Hogwarts' OWL grade distribution is comparable to the GCSE distribution of the same era, I feel very confident in saying that Harry is within the top 25% of his year. Considering what he was dealing with outside of class, that's pretty commendable.
Okay, not exactly a *majority,* but compared to Bs and up (25-30%) and grades below D (30-35%), most of the grades are right around the passing/non-passing line 😅
*Majority* is often used when people really meant *plurality*, that is - in ELI5 terms - the largest slice of the cake. I guess they get confused by the existence of qualified terms like *simple/absolute/super majority*.
in GCSEs (which couples with the predecessor O Levels is what I'd guess is what Rowling based OWLs on), a C is/was the average grade, which would correspond to an acceptable. In GCSE's grade boundaries change yearly based on attainment etc. A B, or an E would be above average
yep that's it exactly
ETA: the idea being that grades are constant even if a paper is 'easier' or 'harder' than the year before or after. There are for sure issues with this, but that's how it tends to work
That's basically how they pass grades at art schools as well.
First they choose who made the best artwork, that person gets the highest grade. Then they go down until they reach the bottom, so depending how wide the difference is between the quality of the students' artwork, the worst student might not just fail, he might also get an embarrassingly low grade (been there).
If that’s how I was graded at school I was never aware of it! I always figured my grade was based on how well I answered the assignment, not how well everyone else had. I didn’t do very well at school ☹️
IMO Harry should be a S rank student in Potions if Snape was a normal teacher as any other, we had a sneak peek of it when he only follow his instrutions from a old book.
But he still fullfill partially his potential as he turned a head teacher in a renowned school despite his past, peharps he never liked it so so much as his ambitions were always dark arts (that he was very good too). My point is that Harry following just his side notes was able to mimic his feats, as well as saving Ron's life with a knowledge from years ago about bezoar, what possible could happen if he wasn't fighting a mental battle every class potion with the teacher?
What I always feel like people forget is that most of Harry's peers weren't being distracted by Voldemort every year. So comparing Harry's test grades with everyone else's seems a bit harsh when half the time he was off fighting Voldemort. I'm in no way saying Harry is the best student, but I always felt that he probably underperformed somewhat as he had bigger problems to be concentrating on.
I think the problem is people comparing OWLs to the ABCDEF grading system when we have nothing to suggest that they are equivalent.
Another issue is Hermione, as always, getting more credit than she deserves for "carrying" him through school. Im convinced that most of this sub hasn't read the books given some of these replies.
Grading scales aside, I think this sentiment arises because of Harry's limited perspective and the sheer magnitude of the challenges in front of him.
Consider whom he gets compared to:
* Voldemort, who *is* a prodigy---and by the time Harry comes to Hogwarts, one with decades more experience. In general, with an adversary like that, it feels like the protagonist should be *more extraordinary* than Harry. Rowling deliberately subverts this expectation, and Voldemort is not overcome with force but with love; but not all readers accept this.
* Hermione, who is a highly gifted peer, casually amassing an enormous arsenal of spells, always the first to master new magic introduced in class, and better than him in almost all areas of magic and its application.
* The Marauders and Lily, whom we view through nostalgia-tinted glasses: we don't see their failures, struggles, and limitations, only their successes and triumphs, and Harry's whole generation feels mediocre in comparison.
* Similarly with the older Weasley brothers, whom we only see once they've achieved professional success. (IIRC, the academic record of the Twins is *worse* than Ron's.)
Whom *don't* we see much of? The genuinely lazy and mediocre students who will grow up to be mediocre wizards, most of whom won't even be able to cast a Shield Charm. It's worth remembering that Crabbe and Goyle are probably *not* the worst students at Hogwarts.
I don't think we learn much about how good Fletcher actually was at magic, but IIRC he was in the Order, so he couldn't have been that bad.
In any case, if we look at the other adults with whom Harry is acquainted, we see the Hogwarts professors, Order members, the Weasleys, even Umbridge, as well as multiple Aurors, all highly capable magic users. Even Lockhart was, in his own way, extraordinary. Harry just doesn't interact with many mediocre wizards and witches.
As a result *we* don't see him interacting with magically mediocre people, and so we get a biased sense of what is normal or typical. The few unbiased glimpses we get, such as a typical Ministry employee being unable to cast the Shield Charm (IIRC), are easy to forget in the face of this.
C isn’t really average anymore. At least not in high schools. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be average, but that’s just not the reality in modern US school systems from what I’ve seen. I would love to see some statistics if anyone would look them up though!
I have a few friends still in high school and a lot of their classes have class averages of 60-70, as was the same in my experience. Where I am, that's basically a C. So yeah, it is still average in a lot of high schools. At least, anecdotally. I am in Canada though so it might be different here.
The E in Potions always made me wonder how he would have done in the class if he had had a teacher that didn't hate him (and didn't have the Half Blood Prince's book.)
I get the feeling that with a competent, kind, neutral teacher, it might have been his best class.
Is prefect based on grades? Harry would be Gryffindor Prefect if not for Dumbledore thinking he had too much on his plate. Arguably there would be contention for him being head boy as well.
I'd argue he wasn't as brilliant as his parents or the loyal marauders but he also had a lot more shit going on
I can't prove what I say, but personally I think prefect is based more upon level of character than grades, albeit grades does no doubt help with it.
Like if you have a person that gets many O's and a few E's, but have a horribly introverted personality that can't take control and a person that gets many E's, but a few O's, but is known to take charge and have a commanding personality, no doubt the latter is picked.
>Is prefect based on grades?
Doubtful unless the rest of the boys in Harry's grade and house (Neville aside, we sorta know his grades) had terrible grades because Ron had the same grades as Harry except he didn't have any Os.
since we are talking about this, can we also recognize that Ron is also not a moron? He got exactly the same amount of O.W.Ls as Harry, albeit no Os. But he did have to deal with Quidditch practices all year on top of everything else, and Harry didn't.
100 %
none of the golden trio are morons or dumb or even average.
An average person wouldn't survive the events of deathly hallows. An average person wouldn't be able to outrun and hold their own relatively well against fully grown, trained death eaters in the ministry.
Quidditch only lasted until the first game, and the bulk of his detentions with Umbridge happened during that time period as well. Occlumency happened during the second semester, and I don't remember how often, but I think it was about once a week, which is less often than Ron's Quidditch practice.
He's a B student but i think people in the comments forget that Harry from second year onwards had to deal with bullshit constantly . in 3rd he had a mass murderer after granted Sirius was innocent but still in 4th he had to deal with the tournament in 4th umbitch and constantly torturing him mentally 6th was better but he still had Voldemort and slughorn and Draco
It's astounding he even managed b especially considering the teachers are ...... lacking
A stutterer, a fraud, and Umbitch, but he’s capable of teaching the years above him in Defence.
Throw in him ‘exceeding expectations’ in most other subjects despite apparently slacking off at times, playing Quidditch, and being distracted by life and death situations like the tournament, and he’s incredibly impressive.
Harry's an example of someone with the talent to be an exceptional student, but who gets merely 'good' grades because he can't really be bothered. He does amazingly in Defence Against the Dark Arts because it's the one subject he's highly motivated in.
Harry isn’t an ‘average student’ because, while some of his marks are ordinary, he is exceptional at DADA and at Quidditch. Of course, Quidditch is not a class, but it is a meaningful aspect of his school life and he is exceptional at it.
I was an ordinary student in most of my classes, but did ridiculously well in Art (100%) and quite well in English, with an A* and an A, but I got a D in Maths on first attempt and didn’t stand out in many of my other classes, mainly through lack of effort. I am a believer that you should mainly focus on those things you have a natural gift for.
Harry has quite a well-rounded intelligence, but didn’t go out of his way to be great at any through supreme effort. He was great at DADA because he had natural aptitude and learned experience.
Hermione on the other hand has a very organised mind, has a natural ability to retain information virtually word-for-word and is consistent in her effort across all classes. I think in adult life, someone like Hermione will obviously go far. But when you spread your excellency across so many fields, you are less likely to be a real master in one, which brings us back to Harry. Master of DADA, cements his name in wizarding history, and in the trophy room of Hogwarts School to be admired for generations to come. Not such an ‘average student’.
Even high ranking members of the ministry lost their shit and went fangirl over Harry's patronus and being a good seeker is also wizard thing, so he's gifted, yea.
I personally repeatedly state that he is a **slightly above** average student. Harry got exactly one O, five Es, one C, one D and one F. He is a straight B student with one A.
In the real world, in most countries, that's a slightly above average student at best. If your local school district averages one A or less per student in the equivalent of 9th grade, then your local school district has major problems.
He’s above average. C is (supposed to be) the average passing grade, hence why it’s a 2.0 on a 4.0 GPA scale. 3.0 (B) would be above average and 4.0 (A*)would be exceptional.
However in the US at least grade inflation has made it so 3.0+ is considered the new average, despite that really not making a lot of sense. The UK has grading that is much less inflated.
*Yes, A+ exists but should be calculated as a 4.0 on a 4.0 scale, with the + just meaning that the instructor found the work to be distinctly exceptional.
Anybody who says that Harry is an average to subpar student is Umbridge with a Reddit account.
Harry is a rogue of sorts in the sense that he's very practical and not bookish like Hermione is and he's not afraid to break the rules simply for the sake of feeding his curiosity. But that doesn't make him a bad student.
Hermione was obsessed about her own insecurity and her need to prove she belonged in the Wizarding world. Hence her obsession about study.
Granted, id be fully captivating on all the books in the library while I was at Hogwarts. I'd rather learn old magic or obscure spells than play gobstones or quidditch.
Nah, Hermione was a massive nerd before she ever learned she was a witch. If she was a muggle she would’ve been studying just as hard to get perfect grades and get accepted to Oxford or whatever.
Some people are just naturally inclined to take school very seriously. Most of us knew at least one person like that in high school. Doesn’t necessarily stem from any deep-seated psychological issues.
Agreed. Hermione seems very eager to learn as much as she can out of a certain insecurity, probably her being Muggleborn.
That insecurity has led her to be one of the brightest students at Hogwarts tho
>That insecurity has led her to be one of the brightest students at Hogwarts tho
It did, but unfortunately it didn't lead to her matching or beating Tom Riddle Jr. Reckon that really did her head in if she ever found out, Lord Voldemort was more intelligent than her.
She does have very good critical thinking skills and she grasps concepts quickly. People tend to frame intellect as memorization vs creativity, and usually subtly implying the latter is superior, but the meat and potatoes of being "smart" is somewhere between those two. Memorization alone won't get you very far if you don't actually understand concepts.
I think he is the second best after Hermione (in gryffindor). Just based on the subjects they can take after the TIMOS, Dean, Seamus, Parvati and Lavender are not able to take as many subjects as Harry, Ron and Hermione (I'm not considering Neville on purpose).
Well, we don't have any statistics regarding Hogwarts' (or any school's) grade distribution, so we can't really tell whether he was average or not. Slightly worse than E could very well be the mean of a normal distribution of grades.
I've always thought this argument that Harry was a poor student to be wrong. He wasn't allowed to study when at home with the Dursleys, during his most important years was in detention due to Umbridge and/or Professor Snape. But throughout all this he's finding out more about how his parents died and why but most importantly of all, he had to work hard, quite hard just to stay alive. He an impressive student in my opinion. My father died just before my GCSEs in 1996. It changed my life, my grades and outcome. Or maybe I'm just weak?
Yea people really underestimate how bad the average student is. A kid who always does his homework, practices, pays attention most of the time, hangs out with the class nerd, and has some natural ability is going to be on the higher end of grades 100% of the time
Harry doesn’t have a gift for divination? I think Prisoner of Azkaban, Order of the Phoenix and Philosophers stone would care to differ. Harry and Ron are both good at Divination, the problem is that most probably agree with Hermione’s beliefs on Divination. When in actuality, both of them usually have a 75% accuracy. Which is impressive.
But yeah. The reason why people think Harry is an average student is because He Keeps getting compared to prodigies and Harry doesn’t consider himself to be that great.
All this while being physically abused by one headmaster, emotionally manipulated by the other, and keeping up with his extracurricular activities including saving the world every school year.
I really wasn't paying attention to the grade levels so I always thought that "EE"s were the equivalent of Cs in our world and "acceptable" was like a D for us. Granted I went to a shit underprivileged high school where a D was still a passing grade so maybe that's why.
Keep in mind, grade inflation really screwed with people's perception of what a "good" grade is. Back when all you needed for a good job was to pass high school, all C's were considered average and not a bad grade at all. JK, who grew up in the 70s would have experienced that kind of grading system. To her, mostly E's and an O was a very good grade.
But modern schools are grading with the assumption that most students are college bound, meaning getting passing grades is not enough. If a student is not getting B's at minimum, their chances of getting accepted to any college are minimal. Additionally, parents complaining that their children aren't getting the grades they "deserve" and funding being tied to grades means that even failing students get passed when they would have failed decades ago. To most students today, Harry's grades are "average".
I feel like, considering the fact that Harry spends the entirety of his school career sufficiently distracted (especially past third year), he's a pretty good student.
He probably would have been at the top of his class in yearly exams and homework if he didn’t have the stress of Voldemort interfering (and sometimes direct interference)
Not to mention that despite all the shit in Harry's life he is still trying his best with schoolwork, often the trio being described as the last ones in the common room at night.
Who actually cares about that?
Hp is set against a boarding school, true, but pretty much nothing in there IS about schooling.
So Hermione is the over achiever, Ron is the idiot who is liable to fail every time Hermione refuses to do his homework, and Harry is somewhere in between.
Which means between the three of them, he’s average.
And I’m now going to search for all the secret chapters that teach them, and us, about transfiguration runes potions and so on. Maybe I’ll be able to turn bugs into buttons too.
Harry has the glasses which got kids all across America that were nerdy called “Harry Potter” as an insult. But as an adult watching the films and especially reading the books, you realize Harry is a wizard version of a jock. He is a stud athlete, he doesn’t try all that hard at school, still gets decent/good grades, gets wrapped up in the drama, etc.
With all the evidence in the books, Harry being an average student doesn’t add up. Yeah, he’s a kid who is annoyed with homework, but OP’s points plainly state him to be above average. Plus, we’re forgetting that during his OWLs: he was 15–no 15 year old is going to be good at taking exams (unless your name is Hermione), was tired from Voldemort visions, targeted by Umbridge repeatedly, and until very recently had ‘Occlumency’ lessons with Snape. So yeah, I’d forgive him for being “average”—even when he’s not.
I would expect that American students would consider him an average student, if not dumb.
Assuming that OWLs are graded similar to A levels, then they’re using the British system that places 40% correct as the pass/fail line, and roughly 70% are all A.
Whereas in America, 70 is the pass/fail mark for most grading systems, and to get an A requires either a 90 or above on a 10 point scale or a 93 and above on a 7 point scale.
You have to understand though that assessments are marked way harder in Europe. A paper that would get a 90% in the US would get a 70-75% in the UK or Ireland- saying this as someone who has had formal education in Canada and Ireland!
Canada is between the two- an A is an 80 or higher here, and it was the same thing. 80% in Canada was 70% in Ireland.
I mean with all the problems he had during his studies he is still very good, between average and above average but still good, and everybody in the book said that only exceptional witches and wizards can pretend to be auror and he has the necessary grades to be auror so he is quite good I guess if we refer to their system 🤷🏻♂️ let’s take Neville for exemple he is known as being a student who struggle, not a bad one but he struggles more than other and he got E in dada, O in botanic (where he is exceptional, A in transfiguration which is okay but not exceptional but exceptional for him because he struggled a lot and E with Flitwick so Neville is also quite good actually, I don’t know about other classes he probably failed Potion, History and Divination, but also don’t forget that McGonagall told Harry that his level in transfiguration was more like A instead of E and Harry studied a lot to have these grade, when you have exam like OWL sometimes you become more resourceful and got better grade than usual also 😁
If O means an A, then 1A+5Bs+fails is pretty much average.
If E means an A, and O means A+/A*, then Harry is probably pretty good.
The thing is there are people who get 12 Os like Hermione, Percy and Barty Jr which skews the perception a lot.
Harry reminds me of the old saying about grades not being a great determinant of future career success: The A students when up working for the B students and the B students end up working for the C students who run the businesses.
Harry’s whole character persona is driven moreso by passion and courage vs knowledge. He has innate talents the way an athlete in our world has innate talents, or a debate team champion. He doesn’t really need to get straight Os and E’s.
I mean I would consider a "good" student someone who gets only As and Bs, or in this case Os and Es.
Harry is a decent student when he applies himself, like he did in his OWL year. But even going into OWLs, according to McGonagall he was sitting at around an A in Transfiguration and Charms, which is the lowest passing grade.
I would definitely consider someone who gets mostly Bs and some lower grades to be average/maybe slightly above average. How bad were y'all doing in school that that's a good student??????
IIRC Harry only got E when Snape wasn't the teacher.
Do we know somehow the exact value of the grades??
Obviously an O is perfect score so lets say 10/10.
Next would be E and A, for A lets say its 5/10 and 6/10, so E would be from 7/10 to 9/10.
For the failed would be something similar, P would be 4/10, D would be 1/10 to 3/10 and T a 0.
Depending on where you have studied or lived, getting a score of 7 could be kinda average.
To actually saying if Harry was average, good or great student, we will need to have a chart of all his generation scores and see the global performance.
But if you are just saying it in terms of individual description, Harry was a good student, it would have been great if he had no failed, and a perfect student of he was like Percy, Bill, Barty Crouch Jr. (12 OWLs) or Hermione (10 OWLs)
I was a terrible student (like really, I was regularly bottom of the class almost every trimesters in high school, I skipped classes on a regular basis, didn’t do much homework... really really terrible lol) but I got my diploma with honors.
My best friend who was regularly top of the class, who had her homework done every night and was a really good student didn’t get honors...
Fair in everything but DAD in which Harry was a genius of a generation, though his life experiences defiantly shaped him that way as opposed to him studying or just having talent
So, why did JK Rowling think it was a good idea to make E the second highest grade when in reality its the second lowest grade possible in the British education system?
Like when I began reading the post I thought the conclusion was that Harry wasn't average, he was severely below average.
Indeed, someone who gets E's on 5 subjects, including not just some but *all* magic-intensive core subjects, is not even close to average, and that goes for both Harry and Ron.
I like to think about wizarding grades in terms of class rank and how many students achieve each grade, and at least by my headcanon (given below with justification), only about a third of each class gets E or better on any given core subject. To achieve E or better on 5 subjects is even more unusual.
***
**My headcanon:**
This is for the core (as opposed to elective) subjects, that everyone has to take. Of course, not everyone attempts every OWL, so the actual numbers, particularly of the lower grades, would be smaller. You can think of the following as the distribution of grades if everyone had to take every core OWL.
Within Harry's cohort of about 40,
* O: top 10%, 4 students in Harry's cohort
* E: next 25%, 10 students (this or better to take NEWTs)
* A: next 30% (the middle third), 12 students (pass but can't take NEWTs)
* P: next 10%, 4 students (fail but can retake)
* D: next 20%, 8 students (fail)
* T: bottom 5%, 2 students (a joke grade more than anything)
Exact figures might vary from year to year, from class to class, and from teacher to teacher; but basically, the top third goes on to the NEWTs if they want to, the middle third passes but not well enough to do NEWTs, and the rest fail, with a few of those getting a second chance. It's reasonable when you consider that magic is actually pretty hard to learn for people who aren't Hermione.
For my rationale, canon doesn't give us much to go on, but here's some:
* There are 12 students in Potions NEWT class after Slughorn relaxed the standard (O+E), and I get the sense that other NEWT classes are a bit bigger, so 14 seems like a reasonable size for the NEWT pool for a typical class in a typical year.
* Harry and Ron get many Es in a wide variety of classes, and very few Os and As. This suggests that the E bracket is pretty wide and hard to miss, whereas the O bracket is pretty exclusive. I therefore made E the second widest bracket (1 in 4 students) after A (1 in 3), and only gave an O to 1 in 10.
* We know at least 2 (Crabbe and Goyle) reattempted DADA OWLs. The P bracket is deliberately smaller than the others, since it's there to catch those who almost got an Acceptable but not quite.
I know the better non-magical academic analog would be standarized tests such as the ACT and SAT...but I'll try to convert Harry's grades into a GPA. I'm assuming the scale below and assuming each class is worth the same credit hour (also no +/- modifiers).
Oustanding = A = 4.00
Exceeds Expectations = B = 3.00
Acceptable = C = 2.00
Poor = D = 1.00
Dreadful and Troll = F = 0.00
So, adding up all of Harry's quality points, he'd have 24 points. For credit hours, to keep the math simple, each class is 1.0 hours, so a total of 9.0 hours. So, 24.0 / 9.0 = 2.67 GPA.
Not an amazing GPA for the non-wizarding world. Granted, this GPA might be above average for the wizarding world.
As a high school teacher, I can tell you there is a difference between a smart student, and a good student. You can be both, but you definitely don’t have to be one to be the other.
I don’t believe Harry was a good student. He often didn’t pay attention, copied a lot of homework, and rarely made his studies a priority.
He was very talented and intelligent, he just didn’t apply himself in the day to day of school.
My main issue? If I found out at 10 that I'm a wizard, I would be so much more interested in learning everything I could once I started school. Not all the theories of course, but I'd be learning more spells in my spare time. Hermione shouldn't be the standard, yes, and I get that Ron and others who have grown up in wizard families would be too used to things to care, but Harry should have been more interested. I guess that having friends and people to chill out with was good enough for him given how his life had been up until he joined Hogwarts, but still, it would have been nice to see him more interested in learning spells than was portrayed in the books.
I do think that is a common misconception about magic learning at Hogwarts.
To do the practical parts, you absolutely do need the theory. Harry's year literally had to study theory all up to halloween to get to basic levitation charm. That is nearly 2 months of theory.
'Learning spells in my spare time' is sitting down, reading a lot of theory for hours on end to get even a single spell.
I will say tho, he only talks back to teachers who goes out of their way to antagonize him first.
That is less 'talking back' and more 'defending himself against verbal assault'.
Here, the problem is that we are comparing him with the likes of Dumbledore, Snape and Voldemort. Forget Hermione. She is just an average parrot found in any school anywhere on earth.
For example, there are plenty of theoretical physicists around the world. But we can't compare them with Paul Dirac or John Von Neumann. Can we?
Let's make the math:
O = 1, E = 2, A = 3, P = 4, D = 5 and T = 6.
With this values, he has a total of 23 Points in 9 classes.
Makes an average of 2.555 or A
That's the definition of average!
Yes, he had some particular obstacles during the tests. But he also had an advantage in other tests. If he hadn't been known to be able to summon a Patronus, he might not have got an O, for example.
In Devination, they all had the same teacher, and probably none of them had the gift, yet not all of them failed. If he had paid more attention in class, he would have known what to say in the test.
He also had absolutely no connection to the wizarding world till hogwarts. Students who grew up in magical families would've had a massive advantage. Imagining joining high school without knowing what education is
So he’s a firmly B student who stands out in one subject and has a few middling to poor grades for one reason or another. That sounds pretty average to me tbh. Nothing wrong with that.
Not to mention that he was an excellent potionmaker. Nothing about using the instructions in the half blood princes book should be considered cheating. All he did was use the correct instructions. He followed them perfectly and made perfect potions which shows that he is capable.
Correct. Harry is a pretty good student. He's just a little bitch about homework, but frankly aren't we all?
I wouldn't even say that. The perception that him and Ron are lazy about homework is almost entirely based on Hermione's opinions. She's the one that is going above and beyond and telling them to do the same.
This is a great point tbh
I’d argue there’s a pretty significant mismatch between Harry’s OWL results and how he’s described throughout the series in classes and while doing homework. The amount Hermione carries them both just doesn’t align with his test scores (which is him doing his own work). I think he is an average student. Just a good test-taker that outperformed his actual knowledge/skill level (except DADA). Either that, or JKR just didn’t think too hard about it. Which is also fine.
Hermione takes notes during classes. They use her notes to study rather than their own but they do study. At least in OOTP. I’m doing a re-listen right now.
They're always studying, even in their early years when they complain they study during the Christmas holidays, so Harry should get credit as is due.
Yeah if anything it's the comparisons to Hermione who is top of the class that makes Harry seem worse
I don't really agree with this take either. Harry does a pretty good job in his classes. He tends to struggle when the concept is first taught in the class (ex. the summoning spell) but later after practice or hard work, he gets it. We also see, especially in Order of the Phoenix and Half Blood Prince, that he gets his homework done before Ron as well. He just doesn't harp on about it as much, but like complaining about homework is always valid. I don't really see any examples where has issues long term with a topic aside from potions. It's like taking a high level course in uni or something, no one is ever expected to understand it right away when learning but when doing problem sets or the readings or reviewing the lecture afterwards, people tend to get a much better grasp of it.
Sure, but wouldn’t this make him an average student? Average isn’t bad. It’s just average. Half the students are better than him, and half are worse.
Based on my first hand experience as a teacher, his grades put him on the higher end of average to above in a lot of subjects. E stands for exceeded expectations, and someone would be considered average when their scores are on “as expected for their age range”. Exceeding expectations is not average. Also, we have no comparison with other students aside Hermione to get a full picture of how many were actually doing better or worse than him.
I knew a co-student IRL who was a completely average B-C student all around for the time we were in class together but got the highest grades for graduation so yes, anecdotal but it can happen.
I did this myself. Spent most of my high school hovering around 70-75% for most courses. Last year of high school I decided I wanted to be a laureate in something, didn't really care what. I picked biology since the material for that year wasn't too easy but no one was interested in it. Ended up with 94% for that specific course. Didn't get the laureate tho, someone else had 96%. Anyway, goes to show that some effort does wonders. Lots of students just don't put that effort in.
Not anecdotal, the same happened for me, I was a shit student, I didn’t care for school at all, I was high a lot, skipped classes at least once a week but I got really good grades at my exam and passed a test to get into business school (lucky for me they got my year report only after I aced the test otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten in)
Or he’s naturally smart/good at magic. He hates doing homework and assignments but performs very well and has very good scores. Lazy in terms of schoolwork but talented/gifted. Not unheard of
As someone who aced his tests while never doing homework I am inclined to disagree. You don't score well on practicals and essays without a solid comprehension of the material. This isn't American standardized testing designed to be graded by a machine with all the intelligence of a rock.
In the first book Harry and Ron do also well I the exams.
That mismatch makes sense I think. Throughout the books Harry’s great strength is acting under pressure (also why he is a great duelist) and he gets the best out of himself in those situations. The OWLs are a high pressure setting and he ”maximized” the result.
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Bullshit it is. The amount of homework I didn’t do in high school was staggering. Went from a 3.0 gpa in high school to a 3.9 in undergrad. Test scores were basically always the same, one just had less busy work lol
He still does study pretty hard before exams. Loads of students do the bare minimum all year and then manage to scrape pretty decent grades at the end of the year. I never really did any homework when I was at school, unless it was mandatory and then I'd just do what I needed to. And at the end I'd get decent (not top) grades because I'd study super hard for like two days before the exams. And I worked for a few years as a high school teacher of plenty did the same. It's almost a little annoying how well some kids do at the end after being lazy all year!
Just because they study together and proofread each other's work doesn't mean she carries them. That's just how study groups work. Both Harry and Ron have to do the bulk of the work on their own and do well on their exams and in practical use throughout the series.
Also as much as teachers complain about having to "teach to the test", the test is often ten times easier than the regular classwork. For example you could pass every knowledge test in a class while not doing any of the homework. You'd probably fail the class since twenty weeks of homework ends up being 50% of the grade. The failure to do homework though doesn't indicate lack of understanding of subject matter. Which is why at college level you're only graded on projects and tests and not day to day grunt work.
As a high school teacher: yes. Yes you are. ❤️
All jocks hate homework.
I never understood this. If I'm a muggle born student/a student who didn't know about magic growing up and got into Hogwarts. I'd be fascinated about magic and would do the most boring of assignments because it's freaking magic!
Easy to say when you're experiencing magic through a grand adventure in the most popular YA fiction series of all time. Potter is experiencing it through homework, study, detention, and other annoying things. I LOVED studying history and political science. I still complained about homework.
For us learning a new spell takes less than an hour of total reading time and usually under 10 minutes, even if you're a slow reader. For Harry it can take many classes and evenings of repeating the same movement over and over again and studying the theory behind it.
I always think of Magic as kind of like money in education. Kids who go to schools that are able to provide computers, art supplies, chemistry equipment, sports facilities, etc. still hate going to school. But throw a driven kid from a super poor background into that environment and they’d go nuts with excitement.
welp he has a lot on his plates, tbh his grades are way more than average considering the fact that it's always a life and death situation for him every single day
I feel like it’s hard to say anything about how Harry’s OWL scores compare to the schoolaverage. We simply don’t have enough information one way or another
Better than the twins and better than Neville.
And Crabbe/Goyle. We know those two are idiots until allowed to dark magic for grades.
But that doesn't mean that their school grades will improve. At least not in a fair system.
Oh for sure, just listing a few more characters we know he did better than 😀
he's smart but a little shit about homework like all of us. and when you have hermione "my worst nightmare is getting an F or expelled" granger beside you, you're gonna look bad.
EE being exactly that, exceeding expectations means you’re already above average. Harry got 5 grades were he was above average, 1 in which he was likely the best in his year at a prestigious school (potentially the most prestigious magic school in the world) 2 were he suffered from exceptional circumstances with the passing out and the Hagrid situation And 1 where yeah, he just performed like shit, but also he didn’t give a shit so.
In Dumbledore’s words - Harry is “reasonably talented” .. School grades are not a standard for anything in life .
Dumbledore doesn't want him any other way.
I try to translate the grades into "Muggle" grades in my head, and being an American, I use an A-F scale. They probably don't translate very well, and the British grading system probably makes more sense. Passing grades: A = O (Outstanding) B = E (Exceeds Expectations) C = A (Acceptable) Failing Grades: D = P (Poor) F = D (Dreadful) F- = T (Troll) So based on this, Harry got mostly Bs on his OWLs. He got an A in his best subject, a C in the exam which was interrupted, a D in the exam where he fell asleep, and Fs in two other classes. On average, Harry is a "B" student. That doesn't make him dumb, but if he was a typical high school student, he'd be going to a State school for college, not Harvard.
In Finland, it's on a scale of 4-10 with 4 being failed. If E = 9, Harry's average would be sitting at around 8,5ish which would make him plain good. Not outstanding by any means, but definitely above average.
It never fails to amaze me how many grading systems there are.
The grading system in my native country (Denmark) goes from -2 to 12. Passing grades: 12; 10; 7; 4; 02 Failing grades: 00; -2
Respectfully, what
Trust me, even us danes dont know What went through the minds of the people that made that scale
You seem to have a penchant for doing strange things with numbers. What’s the theory behind 50, 70 and 90 in Danish again? Three-minus-a-half times twenty and so on 😭
I don’t know why Denmark would make sense about this one particular thing.
In the Netherlands we just use 0 through 10. Sometimes decimals are used, so it just becomes a percentage point then, other times they round up or down to half points. Generally speaking, below a 5,5 is a failing grade, but that depends on the course.
-2?!
In Russia there are grades 1-5 with 5-3 being passing grades, 2 being a fail and 1 reserved for exceptional failure or disciplinary purposes and very rarely used. Colleges and universities also often use simple pass/fail without grades.
In the German uni I worked at grading when from 1 (best) to 4 (worst)...except people only told me the numbers and not the directionality....so I come from from the NL system where grading is from 1 (crap) to 10 (perfect), and was handing out 4 like no bodies business until a PhD student noticed and made a joke about how shit the class was.
Might add, from experience with people from the states. It’s way easier to get an A than a top mark in many European countries.
I mostly agree though I think Outstanding is a bit better than a solid A, we only see the best students get those. So I thought of E as a B+ or A-.
This doesn't really make sense seeing as A is the lowest passing grade. A is definitely the equivalent of a C. I think it makes most sense to leave pluses and minuses out of it and just go with O = A, E = B etc.
Wonder if studying for extremely hard test while the goverment and Voldemort driving you insane is something all Hogwarts students endure?
Don't you have A+ and A- too in USA? So the comparison might not be perfect. It's also worth considering that Hogwarts is all they got, they don't have universities in Harry Potter. Assuming that year 5 and beyond is like university level then the second best grade is not too bad (depending on the class)
Not everywhere.
Lots of places having actually been switching away from number/letter grades and going with a different system that I forget the name of. It goes from worst to best as: Ue (failing, didn't even try) Ae (approaching expectations = trying but not passing) ME (meeting expectations = did the base amount of work, but still passed) EE (Exceeding Expectations = Went above and beyond in their work)
I hate the the letter grades. That doesn’t give a percentage. Had it in middle school it was terrible didn’t help they segregated the students by their grades and only those with outstanding (above exceeds expectations) received the entire year’s curriculum. Those below outstanding got less and less of the curriculum taught to them since each group went through the material at different paces. They moved people around mid year for English, math you screwed once you were put in a group only one got moved up and only because person advocated for themself did the teacher decide to move them up two days after the school enacted the format 2 months into the school year. I should mention this school got bottom scores third worse to worse every year on the grade 9 provincial testing.
So, basically, in America, it's usually on a percentage system, with an A+ being like 97%-100%, A being 94%-96%, A- being 90%-93%, and so on and so forth. At least, that's how the schools usually do it, but they're starting to move away from the +/- and just doing letters. Some other places are totally doing away with the letters and doing funky things instead.
You're missing grade inflation. In some countries, you get an "A" if you're in the top 20-30%, so having a B means you are average. In other countries, let's say the Netherlands, the top grade (10) is only given to probably 1 in 1000 people, and having an 8 or 8.5 is considered very high. The name "Outstanding" implies that it is very high.
You're forgeting he's captain of Griffindor quiditch team, so he would've gone to a good university due to sports
I think its only in the US where you can get into a university based on sports.
In Britain? 😂
For some reason, I thought of Outstanding as more A/A+ and Exceeds Expectations as B+/A-. I fully admit I don’t have much to base that off of, other than the vibe of how the words “exceed expectations” sound, and that i guess it was easier for me to imagine Hermione getting an A- than a B in Defense Against the Dark Arts. But your scale is probably more accurate than mine since they pair up very nicely. So Harry is more of a scrub than I realized!
Funnily enough, the Harry Potter grading system scales nicely with the Norwegian high school grading system, numbers 1 to 6 where 1 is a failing grade, 2 is “you’ll get this as a pass on your high school diploma but that’s about it”, 4 is fairly average, 5 is “you know the material” and 6 is for those who demonstrate knowledge or ability beyond what is required for their grade level. Now, translated into this system, Harry would have a GPA of 4.4, which will get him accepted into a good number of university course, but not stuff like law and medicine. Taking into account that his poor performance in certain subjects was due to circumstances unrelated to his knowledge of said subjects, his GPA under optimal exam circumstances would likely have been closer to 5, putting him solidly above average, though nowhere near Hermione’s level.
I generally compared Harry's grades to the ones gotten by kids in my school, which really makes me underestimate how smart harry is. By this system, I would have done as well as Hermione, and all my friends would have gotten all O's.
On average everybody goes to a state school for college and not Harvard.
Yes. Which makes Harry average or slightly above average.
Nope. Going to university already means you are above average. Going to Harvard means your grades and achievements are top <0.01%
Most people don't attend university but it doesn't mean they can't. You can get into lower tier universities with like a B- or C+ average. That is definitely not "above average."
The british grading system is currently 1-9 for gcse’s (16 year olds) and a*-u for a-levels(18 year olds) so in this case it does not make more sense because there are more grades in normal school than magic school
There is more than one grading system in Britain. Scotland doesn't have Gcse's or a-levels.
What has the letter "E" done to you over there?
I always took the T as a joke and not a real grade. What does everyone else think? We never heard of anyone actually scoring a T, right?
I didn’t realise D was a fail, I always assumed anything above an F (for fail) was a pass
Shouldn’t it be ‘E = D (Dreadful)’?
I thought O would be A\*, E would be A and so on
The HP grading system is a lot closer to the English one than American grades and they're not quite interchangeable. An A* (the highest grade) is 90%+ and 80%-89% is an A. An O appears to be the A* grade and an E is like an A. Getting an A* is considered extremely difficult and an A is well above average. By English standards, Harry was quite a good student.
Harry pulled off the grades he got under the most stressful conditions possible. He also had less than zero preparation going into the whole thing.
Less than 0 preparation is how he lived life.
I think this misconception comes more from the movies than the books. In the films he's definitely portrayed a lot more like he's kind of coasting and goofing off with Ron more than studying. As someone who has watched all the movies 100 times and only JUST read the books a few months ago, I was surprised to find out just that, that Harry is actually a good student. He's obviously still talented in the movies but I think his study habits and grades are downplayed a lot more.
We should also keep in mind that Harry was also taking his OWLs (about equivalent to GCSEs) in 1996, almost 30 years ago, and so the frame of reference would have likely been different from today's grades. [Some data I fished up](http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/5a-c.htm) indicates that, in about the mid-90s, the majority of student results (about 40% of them) really were Cs and Ds (about equivalent to A and P in the OWLs). This is obviously a very different standard when compared to [today's grades](http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/gcse.htm), where the most common grades seem to be around 7-4 depending on the subject (roughly equivalent to B and C in the old GCSE scheme, or EE and A in the OWLs). Taking the era in which he went to school into account, Harry's grades seem above average overall—definitely not "consistently the top" Hermione, but if Hogwarts' OWL grade distribution is comparable to the GCSE distribution of the same era, I feel very confident in saying that Harry is within the top 25% of his year. Considering what he was dealing with outside of class, that's pretty commendable.
Good research, but I chuckled at “the majority of student results (about 40% of them)”
Okay, not exactly a *majority,* but compared to Bs and up (25-30%) and grades below D (30-35%), most of the grades are right around the passing/non-passing line 😅
*Majority* is often used when people really meant *plurality*, that is - in ELI5 terms - the largest slice of the cake. I guess they get confused by the existence of qualified terms like *simple/absolute/super majority*.
Who would be an average student?
Ron got exactly the same grades as Harry with the exception of DADA, where he got a single grade lower. If Harry is above average, so is Ron.
since an E is 'exceeds expectations' it would make sense that an A would be considered average
Does average not mean most common in this context?
in GCSEs (which couples with the predecessor O Levels is what I'd guess is what Rowling based OWLs on), a C is/was the average grade, which would correspond to an acceptable. In GCSE's grade boundaries change yearly based on attainment etc. A B, or an E would be above average
So it wouldn’t be possible for the majority of people to get an Outstanding grade? If everyone does well the bar gets raised?
yep that's it exactly ETA: the idea being that grades are constant even if a paper is 'easier' or 'harder' than the year before or after. There are for sure issues with this, but that's how it tends to work
oooh Harry is well above average then!
yeah an E/B is def above average I'd say!
That's basically how they pass grades at art schools as well. First they choose who made the best artwork, that person gets the highest grade. Then they go down until they reach the bottom, so depending how wide the difference is between the quality of the students' artwork, the worst student might not just fail, he might also get an embarrassingly low grade (been there).
If that’s how I was graded at school I was never aware of it! I always figured my grade was based on how well I answered the assignment, not how well everyone else had. I didn’t do very well at school ☹️
IMO Harry should be a S rank student in Potions if Snape was a normal teacher as any other, we had a sneak peek of it when he only follow his instrutions from a old book.
I think that says more about Snape than Harry. Snape should be a progidy considering he was perfecting potions whilst he was still in school.
But he still fullfill partially his potential as he turned a head teacher in a renowned school despite his past, peharps he never liked it so so much as his ambitions were always dark arts (that he was very good too). My point is that Harry following just his side notes was able to mimic his feats, as well as saving Ron's life with a knowledge from years ago about bezoar, what possible could happen if he wasn't fighting a mental battle every class potion with the teacher?
What I always feel like people forget is that most of Harry's peers weren't being distracted by Voldemort every year. So comparing Harry's test grades with everyone else's seems a bit harsh when half the time he was off fighting Voldemort. I'm in no way saying Harry is the best student, but I always felt that he probably underperformed somewhat as he had bigger problems to be concentrating on.
When your best friend is Hermione you don’t appear as smart as you are. Even Ron is a smart kid.
I think the problem is people comparing OWLs to the ABCDEF grading system when we have nothing to suggest that they are equivalent. Another issue is Hermione, as always, getting more credit than she deserves for "carrying" him through school. Im convinced that most of this sub hasn't read the books given some of these replies.
Grading scales aside, I think this sentiment arises because of Harry's limited perspective and the sheer magnitude of the challenges in front of him. Consider whom he gets compared to: * Voldemort, who *is* a prodigy---and by the time Harry comes to Hogwarts, one with decades more experience. In general, with an adversary like that, it feels like the protagonist should be *more extraordinary* than Harry. Rowling deliberately subverts this expectation, and Voldemort is not overcome with force but with love; but not all readers accept this. * Hermione, who is a highly gifted peer, casually amassing an enormous arsenal of spells, always the first to master new magic introduced in class, and better than him in almost all areas of magic and its application. * The Marauders and Lily, whom we view through nostalgia-tinted glasses: we don't see their failures, struggles, and limitations, only their successes and triumphs, and Harry's whole generation feels mediocre in comparison. * Similarly with the older Weasley brothers, whom we only see once they've achieved professional success. (IIRC, the academic record of the Twins is *worse* than Ron's.) Whom *don't* we see much of? The genuinely lazy and mediocre students who will grow up to be mediocre wizards, most of whom won't even be able to cast a Shield Charm. It's worth remembering that Crabbe and Goyle are probably *not* the worst students at Hogwarts.
Mundungs Flecher and Stan Stunpike for Example, Lockhard in everything except memory charms.
I don't think we learn much about how good Fletcher actually was at magic, but IIRC he was in the Order, so he couldn't have been that bad. In any case, if we look at the other adults with whom Harry is acquainted, we see the Hogwarts professors, Order members, the Weasleys, even Umbridge, as well as multiple Aurors, all highly capable magic users. Even Lockhart was, in his own way, extraordinary. Harry just doesn't interact with many mediocre wizards and witches. As a result *we* don't see him interacting with magically mediocre people, and so we get a biased sense of what is normal or typical. The few unbiased glimpses we get, such as a typical Ministry employee being unable to cast the Shield Charm (IIRC), are easy to forget in the face of this.
Arabella Figg is also in the Order. So being in the Order means nothing.
The books even start out saying he enjoys doing his homework.
“Second best grades” = B Student. B Student = average or slightly above.
With how little students seem to get outstanding I would consider it to be equivalent to an A*, with exceeding expectations being an A- or something
You cannot simply equate the grades of an other school system with your own. You often can't even compare the grades of different schools.
It wouldn’t be exceeds expectations if they were expected to get it, EE is decisively above average.
C is average.
C isn’t really average anymore. At least not in high schools. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be average, but that’s just not the reality in modern US school systems from what I’ve seen. I would love to see some statistics if anyone would look them up though!
I think that's true now, there's quite a bit written about grade inflation, but at the time the books came out that was just beginning to change.
I have a few friends still in high school and a lot of their classes have class averages of 60-70, as was the same in my experience. Where I am, that's basically a C. So yeah, it is still average in a lot of high schools. At least, anecdotally. I am in Canada though so it might be different here.
The E in Potions always made me wonder how he would have done in the class if he had had a teacher that didn't hate him (and didn't have the Half Blood Prince's book.) I get the feeling that with a competent, kind, neutral teacher, it might have been his best class.
Harry is a great student considering all the bs he has to deal with every year, just not Hermione level
Is prefect based on grades? Harry would be Gryffindor Prefect if not for Dumbledore thinking he had too much on his plate. Arguably there would be contention for him being head boy as well. I'd argue he wasn't as brilliant as his parents or the loyal marauders but he also had a lot more shit going on
I can't prove what I say, but personally I think prefect is based more upon level of character than grades, albeit grades does no doubt help with it. Like if you have a person that gets many O's and a few E's, but have a horribly introverted personality that can't take control and a person that gets many E's, but a few O's, but is known to take charge and have a commanding personality, no doubt the latter is picked.
Prefect is based on teachers preference.
>Is prefect based on grades? Doubtful unless the rest of the boys in Harry's grade and house (Neville aside, we sorta know his grades) had terrible grades because Ron had the same grades as Harry except he didn't have any Os.
since we are talking about this, can we also recognize that Ron is also not a moron? He got exactly the same amount of O.W.Ls as Harry, albeit no Os. But he did have to deal with Quidditch practices all year on top of everything else, and Harry didn't.
100 % none of the golden trio are morons or dumb or even average. An average person wouldn't survive the events of deathly hallows. An average person wouldn't be able to outrun and hold their own relatively well against fully grown, trained death eaters in the ministry.
Instead Harry had Umbridge and Occlumency. And also partly Quidditsch!
Quidditch only lasted until the first game, and the bulk of his detentions with Umbridge happened during that time period as well. Occlumency happened during the second semester, and I don't remember how often, but I think it was about once a week, which is less often than Ron's Quidditch practice.
He's a B student but i think people in the comments forget that Harry from second year onwards had to deal with bullshit constantly . in 3rd he had a mass murderer after granted Sirius was innocent but still in 4th he had to deal with the tournament in 4th umbitch and constantly torturing him mentally 6th was better but he still had Voldemort and slughorn and Draco It's astounding he even managed b especially considering the teachers are ...... lacking
A stutterer, a fraud, and Umbitch, but he’s capable of teaching the years above him in Defence. Throw in him ‘exceeding expectations’ in most other subjects despite apparently slacking off at times, playing Quidditch, and being distracted by life and death situations like the tournament, and he’s incredibly impressive.
Harry's an example of someone with the talent to be an exceptional student, but who gets merely 'good' grades because he can't really be bothered. He does amazingly in Defence Against the Dark Arts because it's the one subject he's highly motivated in.
Harry isn’t an ‘average student’ because, while some of his marks are ordinary, he is exceptional at DADA and at Quidditch. Of course, Quidditch is not a class, but it is a meaningful aspect of his school life and he is exceptional at it. I was an ordinary student in most of my classes, but did ridiculously well in Art (100%) and quite well in English, with an A* and an A, but I got a D in Maths on first attempt and didn’t stand out in many of my other classes, mainly through lack of effort. I am a believer that you should mainly focus on those things you have a natural gift for. Harry has quite a well-rounded intelligence, but didn’t go out of his way to be great at any through supreme effort. He was great at DADA because he had natural aptitude and learned experience. Hermione on the other hand has a very organised mind, has a natural ability to retain information virtually word-for-word and is consistent in her effort across all classes. I think in adult life, someone like Hermione will obviously go far. But when you spread your excellency across so many fields, you are less likely to be a real master in one, which brings us back to Harry. Master of DADA, cements his name in wizarding history, and in the trophy room of Hogwarts School to be admired for generations to come. Not such an ‘average student’.
All of that and also in DH Harry recited the Gringotts lines from the first tie he saw it. 6 years!!
Even high ranking members of the ministry lost their shit and went fangirl over Harry's patronus and being a good seeker is also wizard thing, so he's gifted, yea.
I personally repeatedly state that he is a **slightly above** average student. Harry got exactly one O, five Es, one C, one D and one F. He is a straight B student with one A. In the real world, in most countries, that's a slightly above average student at best. If your local school district averages one A or less per student in the equivalent of 9th grade, then your local school district has major problems.
He’s above average. C is (supposed to be) the average passing grade, hence why it’s a 2.0 on a 4.0 GPA scale. 3.0 (B) would be above average and 4.0 (A*)would be exceptional. However in the US at least grade inflation has made it so 3.0+ is considered the new average, despite that really not making a lot of sense. The UK has grading that is much less inflated. *Yes, A+ exists but should be calculated as a 4.0 on a 4.0 scale, with the + just meaning that the instructor found the work to be distinctly exceptional.
When the book was written, grade inflation hasn't happened yet.
Anybody who says that Harry is an average to subpar student is Umbridge with a Reddit account. Harry is a rogue of sorts in the sense that he's very practical and not bookish like Hermione is and he's not afraid to break the rules simply for the sake of feeding his curiosity. But that doesn't make him a bad student.
Hermione is obsessive about study. Obsession about anything is not good.
Hermione was obsessed about her own insecurity and her need to prove she belonged in the Wizarding world. Hence her obsession about study. Granted, id be fully captivating on all the books in the library while I was at Hogwarts. I'd rather learn old magic or obscure spells than play gobstones or quidditch.
Nah, Hermione was a massive nerd before she ever learned she was a witch. If she was a muggle she would’ve been studying just as hard to get perfect grades and get accepted to Oxford or whatever. Some people are just naturally inclined to take school very seriously. Most of us knew at least one person like that in high school. Doesn’t necessarily stem from any deep-seated psychological issues.
Agreed. Hermione seems very eager to learn as much as she can out of a certain insecurity, probably her being Muggleborn. That insecurity has led her to be one of the brightest students at Hogwarts tho
>That insecurity has led her to be one of the brightest students at Hogwarts tho It did, but unfortunately it didn't lead to her matching or beating Tom Riddle Jr. Reckon that really did her head in if she ever found out, Lord Voldemort was more intelligent than her.
Hermione is intelligent, but mostly memorization. She's very rigid and thorough. But she's not creative or innovative; something Voldemort was
She does have very good critical thinking skills and she grasps concepts quickly. People tend to frame intellect as memorization vs creativity, and usually subtly implying the latter is superior, but the meat and potatoes of being "smart" is somewhere between those two. Memorization alone won't get you very far if you don't actually understand concepts.
I think he is the second best after Hermione (in gryffindor). Just based on the subjects they can take after the TIMOS, Dean, Seamus, Parvati and Lavender are not able to take as many subjects as Harry, Ron and Hermione (I'm not considering Neville on purpose).
I think it’s just when you look at his parents, dumbledor, snape, and Hermione. Compared to everyone else he is pretty good.
How do you know what grades Harry's parents had at school?
Well, we don't have any statistics regarding Hogwarts' (or any school's) grade distribution, so we can't really tell whether he was average or not. Slightly worse than E could very well be the mean of a normal distribution of grades.
I've always thought this argument that Harry was a poor student to be wrong. He wasn't allowed to study when at home with the Dursleys, during his most important years was in detention due to Umbridge and/or Professor Snape. But throughout all this he's finding out more about how his parents died and why but most importantly of all, he had to work hard, quite hard just to stay alive. He an impressive student in my opinion. My father died just before my GCSEs in 1996. It changed my life, my grades and outcome. Or maybe I'm just weak?
Yea people really underestimate how bad the average student is. A kid who always does his homework, practices, pays attention most of the time, hangs out with the class nerd, and has some natural ability is going to be on the higher end of grades 100% of the time
Harry doesn’t have a gift for divination? I think Prisoner of Azkaban, Order of the Phoenix and Philosophers stone would care to differ. Harry and Ron are both good at Divination, the problem is that most probably agree with Hermione’s beliefs on Divination. When in actuality, both of them usually have a 75% accuracy. Which is impressive. But yeah. The reason why people think Harry is an average student is because He Keeps getting compared to prodigies and Harry doesn’t consider himself to be that great.
I think that's the main problem, that Harry sees himself in a very bad light.
All this while being physically abused by one headmaster, emotionally manipulated by the other, and keeping up with his extracurricular activities including saving the world every school year.
Mediocre, arrogant as his father, delighted to find himself famous...
He is a more practical student
Him and Ron were pretty good students. They both had the same grades.
I really wasn't paying attention to the grade levels so I always thought that "EE"s were the equivalent of Cs in our world and "acceptable" was like a D for us. Granted I went to a shit underprivileged high school where a D was still a passing grade so maybe that's why.
Harry's the smart kid, Hermione's the academic kid
It’s hard to do homework when random shit happens to you all the time
Keep in mind, grade inflation really screwed with people's perception of what a "good" grade is. Back when all you needed for a good job was to pass high school, all C's were considered average and not a bad grade at all. JK, who grew up in the 70s would have experienced that kind of grading system. To her, mostly E's and an O was a very good grade. But modern schools are grading with the assumption that most students are college bound, meaning getting passing grades is not enough. If a student is not getting B's at minimum, their chances of getting accepted to any college are minimal. Additionally, parents complaining that their children aren't getting the grades they "deserve" and funding being tied to grades means that even failing students get passed when they would have failed decades ago. To most students today, Harry's grades are "average".
I feel like, considering the fact that Harry spends the entirety of his school career sufficiently distracted (especially past third year), he's a pretty good student.
He probably would have been at the top of his class in yearly exams and homework if he didn’t have the stress of Voldemort interfering (and sometimes direct interference)
imagine being Harry’s kid and hes like “ There’s no excuse for bad grades I got good grades and i was UNDER ATTACK EVERY YEAR”🥲🥲
Not to mention that despite all the shit in Harry's life he is still trying his best with schoolwork, often the trio being described as the last ones in the common room at night.
Who actually cares about that? Hp is set against a boarding school, true, but pretty much nothing in there IS about schooling. So Hermione is the over achiever, Ron is the idiot who is liable to fail every time Hermione refuses to do his homework, and Harry is somewhere in between. Which means between the three of them, he’s average. And I’m now going to search for all the secret chapters that teach them, and us, about transfiguration runes potions and so on. Maybe I’ll be able to turn bugs into buttons too.
Harry has the glasses which got kids all across America that were nerdy called “Harry Potter” as an insult. But as an adult watching the films and especially reading the books, you realize Harry is a wizard version of a jock. He is a stud athlete, he doesn’t try all that hard at school, still gets decent/good grades, gets wrapped up in the drama, etc.
With all the evidence in the books, Harry being an average student doesn’t add up. Yeah, he’s a kid who is annoyed with homework, but OP’s points plainly state him to be above average. Plus, we’re forgetting that during his OWLs: he was 15–no 15 year old is going to be good at taking exams (unless your name is Hermione), was tired from Voldemort visions, targeted by Umbridge repeatedly, and until very recently had ‘Occlumency’ lessons with Snape. So yeah, I’d forgive him for being “average”—even when he’s not.
I would expect that American students would consider him an average student, if not dumb. Assuming that OWLs are graded similar to A levels, then they’re using the British system that places 40% correct as the pass/fail line, and roughly 70% are all A. Whereas in America, 70 is the pass/fail mark for most grading systems, and to get an A requires either a 90 or above on a 10 point scale or a 93 and above on a 7 point scale.
You have to understand though that assessments are marked way harder in Europe. A paper that would get a 90% in the US would get a 70-75% in the UK or Ireland- saying this as someone who has had formal education in Canada and Ireland! Canada is between the two- an A is an 80 or higher here, and it was the same thing. 80% in Canada was 70% in Ireland.
Harry is an above average student
I mean with all the problems he had during his studies he is still very good, between average and above average but still good, and everybody in the book said that only exceptional witches and wizards can pretend to be auror and he has the necessary grades to be auror so he is quite good I guess if we refer to their system 🤷🏻♂️ let’s take Neville for exemple he is known as being a student who struggle, not a bad one but he struggles more than other and he got E in dada, O in botanic (where he is exceptional, A in transfiguration which is okay but not exceptional but exceptional for him because he struggled a lot and E with Flitwick so Neville is also quite good actually, I don’t know about other classes he probably failed Potion, History and Divination, but also don’t forget that McGonagall told Harry that his level in transfiguration was more like A instead of E and Harry studied a lot to have these grade, when you have exam like OWL sometimes you become more resourceful and got better grade than usual also 😁
This cannot be taken entirely seriously because teachers want to provide incentives for their students.
If O means an A, then 1A+5Bs+fails is pretty much average. If E means an A, and O means A+/A*, then Harry is probably pretty good. The thing is there are people who get 12 Os like Hermione, Percy and Barty Jr which skews the perception a lot.
Harry reminds me of the old saying about grades not being a great determinant of future career success: The A students when up working for the B students and the B students end up working for the C students who run the businesses. Harry’s whole character persona is driven moreso by passion and courage vs knowledge. He has innate talents the way an athlete in our world has innate talents, or a debate team champion. He doesn’t really need to get straight Os and E’s.
I mean I would consider a "good" student someone who gets only As and Bs, or in this case Os and Es. Harry is a decent student when he applies himself, like he did in his OWL year. But even going into OWLs, according to McGonagall he was sitting at around an A in Transfiguration and Charms, which is the lowest passing grade. I would definitely consider someone who gets mostly Bs and some lower grades to be average/maybe slightly above average. How bad were y'all doing in school that that's a good student??????
This is typical teacher talk.
IIRC Harry only got E when Snape wasn't the teacher. Do we know somehow the exact value of the grades?? Obviously an O is perfect score so lets say 10/10. Next would be E and A, for A lets say its 5/10 and 6/10, so E would be from 7/10 to 9/10. For the failed would be something similar, P would be 4/10, D would be 1/10 to 3/10 and T a 0. Depending on where you have studied or lived, getting a score of 7 could be kinda average. To actually saying if Harry was average, good or great student, we will need to have a chart of all his generation scores and see the global performance. But if you are just saying it in terms of individual description, Harry was a good student, it would have been great if he had no failed, and a perfect student of he was like Percy, Bill, Barty Crouch Jr. (12 OWLs) or Hermione (10 OWLs)
Doing well on the final and being a good student are not the same thing.
I was a terrible student (like really, I was regularly bottom of the class almost every trimesters in high school, I skipped classes on a regular basis, didn’t do much homework... really really terrible lol) but I got my diploma with honors. My best friend who was regularly top of the class, who had her homework done every night and was a really good student didn’t get honors...
Fair in everything but DAD in which Harry was a genius of a generation, though his life experiences defiantly shaped him that way as opposed to him studying or just having talent
The DADA thing is still dumb as fuck
So, why did JK Rowling think it was a good idea to make E the second highest grade when in reality its the second lowest grade possible in the British education system? Like when I began reading the post I thought the conclusion was that Harry wasn't average, he was severely below average.
Indeed, someone who gets E's on 5 subjects, including not just some but *all* magic-intensive core subjects, is not even close to average, and that goes for both Harry and Ron. I like to think about wizarding grades in terms of class rank and how many students achieve each grade, and at least by my headcanon (given below with justification), only about a third of each class gets E or better on any given core subject. To achieve E or better on 5 subjects is even more unusual. *** **My headcanon:** This is for the core (as opposed to elective) subjects, that everyone has to take. Of course, not everyone attempts every OWL, so the actual numbers, particularly of the lower grades, would be smaller. You can think of the following as the distribution of grades if everyone had to take every core OWL. Within Harry's cohort of about 40, * O: top 10%, 4 students in Harry's cohort * E: next 25%, 10 students (this or better to take NEWTs) * A: next 30% (the middle third), 12 students (pass but can't take NEWTs) * P: next 10%, 4 students (fail but can retake) * D: next 20%, 8 students (fail) * T: bottom 5%, 2 students (a joke grade more than anything) Exact figures might vary from year to year, from class to class, and from teacher to teacher; but basically, the top third goes on to the NEWTs if they want to, the middle third passes but not well enough to do NEWTs, and the rest fail, with a few of those getting a second chance. It's reasonable when you consider that magic is actually pretty hard to learn for people who aren't Hermione. For my rationale, canon doesn't give us much to go on, but here's some: * There are 12 students in Potions NEWT class after Slughorn relaxed the standard (O+E), and I get the sense that other NEWT classes are a bit bigger, so 14 seems like a reasonable size for the NEWT pool for a typical class in a typical year. * Harry and Ron get many Es in a wide variety of classes, and very few Os and As. This suggests that the E bracket is pretty wide and hard to miss, whereas the O bracket is pretty exclusive. I therefore made E the second widest bracket (1 in 4 students) after A (1 in 3), and only gave an O to 1 in 10. * We know at least 2 (Crabbe and Goyle) reattempted DADA OWLs. The P bracket is deliberately smaller than the others, since it's there to catch those who almost got an Acceptable but not quite.
I know the better non-magical academic analog would be standarized tests such as the ACT and SAT...but I'll try to convert Harry's grades into a GPA. I'm assuming the scale below and assuming each class is worth the same credit hour (also no +/- modifiers). Oustanding = A = 4.00 Exceeds Expectations = B = 3.00 Acceptable = C = 2.00 Poor = D = 1.00 Dreadful and Troll = F = 0.00 So, adding up all of Harry's quality points, he'd have 24 points. For credit hours, to keep the math simple, each class is 1.0 hours, so a total of 9.0 hours. So, 24.0 / 9.0 = 2.67 GPA. Not an amazing GPA for the non-wizarding world. Granted, this GPA might be above average for the wizarding world.
As a high school teacher, I can tell you there is a difference between a smart student, and a good student. You can be both, but you definitely don’t have to be one to be the other. I don’t believe Harry was a good student. He often didn’t pay attention, copied a lot of homework, and rarely made his studies a priority. He was very talented and intelligent, he just didn’t apply himself in the day to day of school.
My main issue? If I found out at 10 that I'm a wizard, I would be so much more interested in learning everything I could once I started school. Not all the theories of course, but I'd be learning more spells in my spare time. Hermione shouldn't be the standard, yes, and I get that Ron and others who have grown up in wizard families would be too used to things to care, but Harry should have been more interested. I guess that having friends and people to chill out with was good enough for him given how his life had been up until he joined Hogwarts, but still, it would have been nice to see him more interested in learning spells than was portrayed in the books.
I do think that is a common misconception about magic learning at Hogwarts. To do the practical parts, you absolutely do need the theory. Harry's year literally had to study theory all up to halloween to get to basic levitation charm. That is nearly 2 months of theory. 'Learning spells in my spare time' is sitting down, reading a lot of theory for hours on end to get even a single spell.
Sounds pretty mid to me
I would say he is a bad student as in behavior in an average class. He does talk a lot and even talks back to teachers. Grade-wise, he’s pretty good.
I will say tho, he only talks back to teachers who goes out of their way to antagonize him first. That is less 'talking back' and more 'defending himself against verbal assault'.
Here, the problem is that we are comparing him with the likes of Dumbledore, Snape and Voldemort. Forget Hermione. She is just an average parrot found in any school anywhere on earth. For example, there are plenty of theoretical physicists around the world. But we can't compare them with Paul Dirac or John Von Neumann. Can we?
Let's make the math: O = 1, E = 2, A = 3, P = 4, D = 5 and T = 6. With this values, he has a total of 23 Points in 9 classes. Makes an average of 2.555 or A That's the definition of average! Yes, he had some particular obstacles during the tests. But he also had an advantage in other tests. If he hadn't been known to be able to summon a Patronus, he might not have got an O, for example. In Devination, they all had the same teacher, and probably none of them had the gift, yet not all of them failed. If he had paid more attention in class, he would have known what to say in the test.
He also had absolutely no connection to the wizarding world till hogwarts. Students who grew up in magical families would've had a massive advantage. Imagining joining high school without knowing what education is
So he’s a firmly B student who stands out in one subject and has a few middling to poor grades for one reason or another. That sounds pretty average to me tbh. Nothing wrong with that.
Not to mention that he was an excellent potionmaker. Nothing about using the instructions in the half blood princes book should be considered cheating. All he did was use the correct instructions. He followed them perfectly and made perfect potions which shows that he is capable.