FACT: if you fail to fail you might earn an E grade

In popular internet culture, declaring a “FAIL” is the best thing since bacon. But today we’re looking at the almost-fail. In North American schools you’re most often given a letter grade: A, B, C, D, or F. But hey now… what happened to E?

Some grading systems do include an E grade, like the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, or ECTS. (that’s right, they may have an E in their grades, but they’re missing an A in their name) They use the E grade to mean “sufficient”, or meeting the minimum requirement. Australian schools give an E for “unsatisfactory” scores in the 40 to 60 percent range. It seems that wherever it’s used a grade E is given to mean “very close to failing” or sometimes “you are failing now, but you can make up for it”.

So the question is, why has the E vanished from schools in most of the US, Canada and many other parts of the world? I’ve found no hard facts, but a few theories…

In the early years of school you are often graded by what the teacher thinks of your performance. In that case E for “excellent” was the top mark, followed by G for “good”, S for “satisfactory”, and the dreaded N for “needs improvement”. So perhaps E has fallen out of favour to avoid confusion.

And you certainly can’t trust those wily kids nowadays. If a paper had an F grade written on it, it would be quite simple to upgrade to an E with a stroke of the red pen. Mind you… I don’t think “almost failing” is really impressive enough to warrant the effort.

My gut tells me that 6 grade levels was too many for practical use. A, B, C, D and “Not Good Enough” is all that was needed, so one letter had to go. I’ve found evidence of some US high schools grading from A-E, but it has proven more popular to use F rather than E simply because of the convenient fact: F stands for FAIL!

• Source: Grading systems from around the world – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_(education)
• This article inspired by a question emailed to me from Nicholas at Louisiana State University… you can email me questions too, ya know.

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