Words are wind... even on the internet, I guess?

Since my last report, written by some guy who thought Leadership Management might be released by now (derp), the upcoming Management course has been thoroughly rewritten. It's, like, not even the same course anymore. It still needs some polishing and the exam has to be rewritten. That's what's holding us back now, and it shouldn't take too much longer.

Look for a retraction of everything I just said next time.

Professor Newguy

As announced waaay back in exactly two weeks ago, Teu vacated the position of Professor of CORE Studies due to real life conflicts. I'd like to thank her again for her time as Professor, and I'm happy to announce that we have selected her replacement. We received several excellent applications -- all from Dark Jedi Knights, interestingly -- and ultimately we decided to go with someone who has already shown an impressive interest in the Shadow Academy: Zagro Fenn, who has racked up an astonishing 159 academic credits in his five months as a member of the Brotherhood. This will be Zagro's first venture into the mysterious land of reading a lot and pushing buttons (while brooding in a dark room because evil), so wish him luck and go take those light side COREs (I'm looking at you, Howie).

In other news...

It's been a slow month since my last report. My staff ran off to participate in Fading Light while my exam queue filled up with an impressive 103 trivia submissions. I was very pleased with the participation in that event all around, and I want to take a little time in this report to explain it and give a little information on the results.

Many of you recall the last vendetta trivia event during the Dark Crusade. At that time, Solari created ten separate courses that were randomly assigned to participants as they signed up. To ease the administrative burden of creating ten distinct courses, this time around I bribed the power behind the throne and everything else to create a new question grouping function for Shadow Academy exams. Thanks to James' dark side voodoo, I was able to create a single exam of 33 questions, split into 12 groups based on question type and (perceived -- by me) difficulty. When you opened the exam, you were presented with a randomized exam comprised of one question from each of those 12 groups.

As for the outcome, of the 103 submissions one was excluded for being blank. Of the 102 remaining, the average score was 59.72% (which is why so many of you received an "exam failed" email -- ignore it, you'll get full participation credit and you've already got your seal regardless of your score; moreover, it doesn't count against your course average in the Shadow Academy). Several people clearly did not heed the warning to only click the exam link when prepared to complete it: the longest completion time was 454 hours; the shortest was 3 minutes. Excluding those who took more than 24 hours to complete the exam, the average time was a more reasonable 37 minutes, 42 seconds.

The winners were all fast, as Sarin noted in his report:

1. Howlader - 8 minutes
   
2. Andrelious - 11 minutes
   
3. Shadow - 12 minutes
   

Some people apparently mistakenly believed the trivia was just a Wiki search; in fact, all of the answers were available in old Grand Master, Deputy Grand Master, and Voice reports, or on the Wiki. But the answers to all questions were not necessarily in all of those places. :p

I've received generally positive feedback on the trivia, and I'll probably run something like it again in the future whether as part of a future vendetta or just for Shadow Academy lootz. I'd like to hear what you thought of it, good and bad. My own observation, after quadruple-checking each submission, is that of course question phrasing is important. I worked hard to write clear questions but when people actually sat down to take this thing, flaws became obvious. I tried to be both accomodating and fair in the grading.

I enjoyed it, I hope you enjoyed it in the breaths between curses, and yay! it's over! Congratulations, all!

The Audit!

Audit work is progressing on both the Department of Writing Studies and the Department of Lore Studies. With Fading Light out of the way and some downtime before the Great Jedi War, I'm going to refocus my staff on releasing revised courses in November and December.

Top Exam Takers!

Since my last report, the top five exam takers (and this includes Fading Light trivia :p) at the SA are:

Name	# of Exams
GRD Misium	22
DJK Egregious	21
PRT Kelly Mendes	20
JK Zeon Blacktooth	16
NOV Malik Sunfell	15

Great work, everyone!

Conclusion

As always, I'd like to close this report by asking for your help. The SA is a massive wall of text that covers ever-shifting topics and is prone to typos and run-on sentences. If you spot substantive or grammatical problems, please let me, Ood, and the course PROF know so that we can fix them ASAP. As we work through the Departments during the audit, we're also going to be asking for help reading and editing -- if you have any particular expertise, let us know when we announce the next Department being audited. There are shiny things available. :P

Bubba

Sith Warlord Dacien Victae di Plagia
Headmaster of the Dark Jedi Brotherhood