My daughter in High School told me not to worry about her poor grades, because “after all, Einstein failed High School”. I’ve heard this before, didn’t believe it then, and don’t believe it now. But who knows, maybe Einstein did fail in school. Anyone know the truth? JT
This link answers your question. He didn’t fail High School. He did fail a college entrance exam the first time that he took it but he took it at the age of 16 instead of the usual age of 18.
Haj
No, he didn’t fail “High School”, but he was, for a period, a drop-out.
While he never liked school, he had been successful: a letter by his mother when he was 7 notes “Yesterday Albert received his grades, he was again number one, his report card was brilliant.” And that’s pretty much the pattern until 1895 when he was 16, when his family moved to Italy leaving him at school in Munich. He found this miserable and wangled a release from the school without telling his parents. (The fact that, if he were still in Germany come 17, he’d have to do national service may also be a factor here.) Parents duly annoyed. At this stage he didn’t have any qualifications and then failed the entrance examination to get into the ETH is Zurich, as noted by hajario. Even then, he apparently was still doing well in maths and science; it was the language and history parts that he failed.
He then went back to school in Aarau to try to get his Matura certificate. This he did pass; with 6 the maximum, his grades were German 5, Italian 5, history 6, geography 4, algebra 6, geometry 6, descriptive geometry 6, physics 6, chemistry 5, natural history 5, drawing (art) 4 and drawing (technical) 4. As far as I can see, this got him into the ETH without having to retake their exam.
Main source for this is Pais’ biography. I have seen it suggested that some confusion arose amongst other writers about the numbering on his school reports, with them misreading high marks for low ones. But I don’t have an explicit cite for this and it smacks of too good a story in itself.
Somewhere I read that shortly after Einstein was in school they changed the numbering system for marks, so that his good grades looked like bad grades under the new system. But no cite here, either.