In the movie Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, there is this exchange:
Captain Spock: The lieutenant was the first Vulcan to be graduated at the top of her class.
Captain James T. Kirk: You must be very proud.
Lieutenant Valeris: I don’t believe so.
Commander Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy, M.D.: She’s a Vulcan all right.
Yippee for Valeris, but who beat Spock? Not Kirk, obviously, since he’s much younger than Spock. Not McCoy, since Star Fleet Medical is almost certainly a different thing than Star Fleet Academy, and besides, if McCoy had beat Spock, he never would have let him forget it. Scotty, maybe? Or some other person? Do any of the novels (or an episode I missed) mention this?
Or, since I think Spock was one of the first to go through the Academy, was there prejudice against him? Or maybe somebody hacked into the computers to change the grades so that somebody else was first? (We know the computers can be fiddled with, Kirk did it with the Kobayashi Maru.)
Starfleet Academy is strongly biased toward human decision-making and command training. I am not surprised that Spock was not able to fake his responses to match those defined by humans.
According to the Star Trek wikipedia, Spock was only one year ahead of Kirk at the academy (Spock: 2249-2253; Kirk, 2250-2254). Doesn’t answer your question though.
I’ve been watching the remastered TOS lately, and one thing that I’d never picked up on before is that Spock is far from a model officer. He often acts unilaterally, without consulting with other officers, and he has trouble inspiring confidence in men under his command, in large part because he continually fails to take the emotions into account.
I can easily see those traits holding back his grades at the Academy.
Jesus, that would be a sad, sad life. Graduate top of your class from the Academy, wind up driving* a cargo ship, get killed on the whim of a pissant omnipotent alien.
Spock was held back a year. An accident with a mechanical rice picker.
fanwanked real answer (already posted upstream), Spock is not full blooded Vulcan. (ST:ENT taught us that Vulcanians are very prejudiced, in their own logical way.)
A point that, I think the early episode The Galileio Seven made pretty clear. IMO one of the main dramatic functions of the ongoing Spock/McCoy rivalry is that it vocalized the conflicting arguments leading to Kirk’s command decisions, making Kirk seem like the ideal commander.