The Golarion Gazette

Archivists looking through old senior theses produced by students of wizardry at Theumanexus College in Korvosa recently announced that they noticed something unexpected: despite the hundreds of students who have graduated over the past years, a majority of the theses appear to be near-identical copies of one another. “We found that pretty much all the theses are in one of five categories: familiars, metamagic, staffs, mucking with which ranks of spell slots you have, and switching out spells midday,” said Firaen Parabas, a kitsune archivist who helped make the discovery. “And within each category, a lot of the theses are basically identical, with the same experiments, and the same supposedly ‘novel’ techniques.” Despite the similarities, many of the advisors who worked with the students on their theses say that the students did come up with the ideas on their own, and archivists are trying to retrace the lineage of who copied off of whom to uncover what was actually going on.

Critics of the magical education establishment have seized on the incident as yet another example of declining educational standards. “It’s not a surprise that students find their only path to success is to cheat, when they come in completely unprepared to cast even the most basic cantrips,” said Ravindra Fireheart, author of the bestseller Why Jathal Can’t Spell. “Decades ago, our wizards had near godlike powers, able to freeze whole swathes of enemies in their tracks or give themselves superhuman strength with a single spell. But now, our schools are graduating students who can’t even stack two simple buff spells together.” On the other hand, defenders of the system argue that schools are doing the best they can given the hostile environment that they find themselves in. “Even we have a hard time educating students when half the time, we have to cancel class to fight off a horde of monsters that are attacking the school,” said High Sun-Mage Oyamba, leader of the Magaambya Academy.

Theumanexus College’s longtime rivals, the more prestigious Acadamae, have seized the opportunity to brag about their superiority, pointing out their higher rankings in test scores, publications, and graduation rates and saying that “even when [Theumanexus College] cheats, they still can’t beat us.” But Theumanexus’ president shot back by accusing the Acadamae of cherry-picking data, saying that “how do those statistics look when you account for the fact that you kill the bottom fifth of your students?”