Personally, I’m inclined to think we’re doing the marking ourselves, just because that’s so efficient. After all, we mostly know what marks we deserve, and we certainly know the marks we want to get and what marks we’re afraid of getting, and whenever we see bits of someone else’s work we get an idea of what they ought to get. I’d bet that the school more or less goes by the sum of the parts, depending on how much will and mana each person has put behind their judgment. Which also handily explains the bloc of self-satisfied enclavers who annually fill up the class rankings only a little way down from the actual valedictorian candidates, despite not doing nearly as much work and not being nearly as clever as they think they are.
None of these possibilities told me what to expect in the way of marks for myself, since this year I was entirely alone in the one seminar to which I’d devoted massive amounts of time and energy and passion and mana, and apart from that I was in three other small-group seminars that I’d aggressively neglected.
You’d think that marks wouldn’t matter very much senior year unless you were going for valedictorian, since we literally don’t take classes for the second half of the year. After the class standings are announced at the end of the first semester, seniors are given the rest of the year off to prep for their graduation runs.
But that’s in the nature of a grudging surrender. Graduation wasn’t designed to be a slaughterhouse gauntlet of mals. The cleansing routine we fixed last term was intended to winnow them down to a reasonable level every year before the seniors got dumped in to make their escape back to the real world. After the machinery broke four times in the first decade, and the enclaves gave up on repairing it, seniors largely stopped going to class, because there’s a point where training and practicing with the spells and equipment you’ve got is more important than getting new ones. When there’re a thousand howling starved mals coming at you from all sides, you want your reactions worked thoroughly into your muscle memory.
So the powers that be running the school at the time—London had taken it over from Manchester by then, with substantial support from Edinburgh, Paris, and Munich; opinions from St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Lisbon taken under advisement; New York and Kyoto occasionally given a patronizing ear—decided that they’d accept the reality and turned it into a deadline. And up to that deadline, the school does its best to make marks matter. The penalties get especially vicious for our last semester. Finals are the worst of it, but even midterms are generally good for taking out at least a dozen seniors.
I was relatively safe for the Proto-Indo-European seminar because I’d cheated on that one essay, which always gets you good marks. The school’s perfectly willing to let you leave dangerous gaps in your education. The only risk there was that I’d actually done some work on the thing beyond copying it out; I’d get marked down for that, although probably still not to failing level.
The translation I’d handed in for my final Myrddin seminar poetry assignment was a rotten half-baked job I’d run through in two hours, guessing wildly at the many words I didn’t know. It hadn’t left me with any spells I could even sound out, at least not if I didn’t want to risk blowing the top of my own head off. I’d got top marks on the lovely deconstruction spell I’d used on Chloe’s cushion-monster, though, which was likely to pull my grade there to safe levels.
Aadhya had helped me with the maths in my Algebra course, and I’d done a load of translations for her. Artificers don’t get language classes in their senior year; instead they just get assigned a design project in one of their other languages. Design projects are a really special fun thing for artificers. You’re given a set of requirements for some object, you write down the steps to build the thing, and then the Scholomance builds it for you. Exactly according to your instructions. Then you have to try the resulting object out and see what it does. Three guesses what happens if your instructions turn out to have been wrong or insufficiently detailed.
Having to do a design project in a second language makes it even more exciting. And in this case, Aadhya’s languages are Bengali and Hindi, both of which she knows really well, except the school swerved and gave her the projects in Urdu instead, which happens sometimes if it’s feeling particularly nasty. She didn’t know the script well, and anyway subtle differences in meaning matter quite a lot in these circumstances. You’d really like to be confident that you’re not building a blasting gun backwards, for instance.