History and Purpose
Avar Academy was established in year 47 of the current calendar by royal decree of the second sovereign monarch, Queen Lysa Valdren, as a centralized institution for the identification and development of Aethoria's most capable young talent. Its founding principle, stated in the original royal charter and unchanged across twenty five subsequent revisions, is the cultivation of individuals capable of serving the kingdom at the highest levels of military, political, and arcane endeavour.
The academy accepts students at age seventeen and runs a four year program. Graduation from Avar is the most reliable single credential in Aethoria for advancement in any field that intersects with power, which in practice means most fields.
Class Structure
The academy divides its student body into six classes designated F through S, assessed on arrival and reassigned at the end of each academic year based on performance. Movement between classes is possible in both directions. Moving up requires demonstrating capability above your current class standard. Moving down requires demonstrating the opposite.
F class accommodates the largest number of students and operates with the broadest curriculum. The coursework is foundational and the pace is managed to ensure no enrolled student falls completely behind regardless of their entry level.
Each ascending class reduces in size and increases in intensity. D class students are expected to be managing independent training regimens alongside their coursework. C class students begin specialisation. B and A class students operate on increasingly individualised programs designed around their specific strengths and projected roles.
S class is a category of its own.
S Class
S class at Avar Academy accepts a maximum of ten students per enrollment year. Selection is based on pre-enrollment evaluations conducted by senior academy faculty across the kingdom's fourteen provinces, supplemented by guild records, noble house assessments, and in some cases direct faculty observation.
The S class curriculum is not published. It is developed individually for each cohort based on the specific composition of that year's ten students and revised continuously as the year progresses. S class students do not attend standard lectures. They do not follow a fixed schedule. They are assigned a dedicated faculty advisor and given access to every resource the academy possesses with the expectation that they will use those resources to develop in ways the academy cannot fully predict or prescribe.
S class students are not graded in the conventional sense. They are evaluated. The distinction matters. Grading measures performance against a fixed standard. Evaluation measures development against potential, which requires first establishing what that potential actually is.
This is, for most S class students, a more uncomfortable process than grading would be.
The ten students who make up any given S class cohort will spend four years in closer proximity to each other than to anyone else in the academy. They will train together, compete against each other, and in many cases define each other's development in ways that only become clear in retrospect. The history of Aethoria's most significant figures contains a disproportionate number of Avar S class alumni, and a disproportionate number of those alumni have cited their S class cohort as the most formative relationship of their professional lives.
Whether that relationship was one of friendship, rivalry, or something more complicated varies by cohort.
The current year's S class cohort is noted in the academic record as requiring an addendum to the standard enrollment documentation due to assessment instrument irregularities during the intake process.
The addendum is pending review.