@thriftymaid: We’re hijacking the thread here, but I have to ask, when (and where) was that? (That sounds disbelieving. It’s not meant to. I’m really just curious. I find this really interesting.)
When I was in elementary school, whether you passed or failed a grade was kind of subjective. The teacher would review the student’s grades over the course of the year and decide if they thought the student had progressed enough overall. Then they’d recommend “pass” or “fail” (or, on occasion, “skip” if the student was that much more advanced than their peers) and say which teacher they thought the student should have the next year. Parents were able to appeal if they strongly disagreed with a decision. (For example, one year my parents and my best friend’s parents appealed our teacher’s recommendation to put us in the same classroom the next year because we fought too much when we were together all day, so the principal gave us different teachers the next year.)
In middle and high school it became an objective thing because we had a different teacher for each subject instead of just one for all of them. You had to maintain an average of 65% through the whole year and also pass the final exam at the end of the year in order to pass the class as a whole. You could fail one subject and still move up to a homeroom for the next grade the following year, and only repeat the subject you failed. If you failed two subjects, you still moved forward in the classes that you did pass, but you were kept back in the ones you failed and also in homeroom, which meant you weren’t allowed to graduate with the class you’d started with. It got rather complicated; in my junior year I had at least one class in every grade level. (Mostly junior classes, senior French because I was in an accelerated program, sophomore math because I’d failed, and freshman science because I’d been skipped over it and chose to go back and take it anyway so I could get a science sequence for my diploma.)