Hey, everyone. No opening fiction this time around, just sheer reportage. Let's get on it.

The Shadow Academy Debate League's first official event has begun! We have ten participants fighting to become a master of argumentation and refutation. If you signed up for the event, please be sure to check the link below to find your matches. If you did not sign up, click the link anyway to witness the debates yourself.

Click here for the Debate Forum

Please also remember that the two Debate exams are always around if you wish to learn how to properly argue with someone. They will help immensely should you decide to participate in the League's events in the future.

The Shadow Academy is officially opening up a new position. As you all know, auditing takes a lot of time, patience, and meticulous work. While we have tried on our own to take care of the editing and modifying of exams - as well as ask for volunteer help - this is a project that needs complete and undivided attention by an awesome and consistent individual. Therefore, we have decided to accept applications for Magistrate of the Shadow Academy.

Your job, as Magistrate, would be to serve as the lead auditor for all exams in the Shadow Academy. As new exams and ideas are constantly being juggled around, your workload would be fairly consistent in terms of overhauling, research, proposals, and proofreading. You would not just merely fix some spelling errors - you would, instead, be doing some deliberate changes to the answer keys, content, and links to outside sources. It is important to ensure that exams make sense, don't confuse or misguide the test takers, and look good in terms of presentation.

Submit your application to Slags and me at [Log in to view e-mail addresses] and [Log in to view e-mail addresses], whilst CCing GM Muz at [Log in to view e-mail addresses]. Do not go on about your leadership experience - that's not relevant. Instead, we would like to hear about what projects you have taken on as a member and what work you have done (if any) for the Shadow Academy.

The deadline for Magistrate applications will be two weeks from today, on July 7th, 2012.

As we always say, the Shadow Academy is more than happy to take exam suggestions and ideas. However, in response to some of the e-mails we've received, we would like to list two criteria that your suggestions need to meet in order to be considered for the Academy.

1. Make sure your idea has not been done before. Many times we get ideas for exams which content has already been covered on at least a basic level. As much as you might think an exam going into more detail would be better, it makes for very repetitive and redundant test taking.

2. Your exam must have weight. This means that if you offer an idea, the exam written for it has to have enough substantial content, has to be long enough, and has to spark enough public interest. Even if your exam meets the first two elements of the list, if nobody wants to take it, that's a problem. Things to consider for public interest would be "Does this exam take too long?", "Is it too difficult?", or "Does it require too much outside work?"

While we really don't want to scare people off if they have really good ideas for exams, more often than not, we do turn away suggestions because they fail in at least one of the criteria listed above. However, we're normally pretty gentle about responding to e-mails, so don't be shy when it comes to proposals. Please e-mail Slags and me with any exam ideas you have, and we'll see if we can use them.

To wrap up this short but sweet report (no TL;DR for you!), here's yet another hybrid of Star Wars comedy and educational humor colliding to create a vortex of awesome:

That should do it.

• Ronovi Tavisaen Dupar Headmaster of the Shadow Academy