I doubt drugs have anything to do with it, but I’d imagine A, B, C, D being relative to #1, and F being the more dramatic “Fail”. A clear separation from below average “D”.
When I was in elementary school (about 20 years ago), E was used for Excellent, instead of the letter A. After E was B, C, D, and U, for Unsatisfactory. Maybe other schools skipped E to avoid confusion with this competing system, which eventually disappeared?
School grading systems vary wildly. Some schools use E to denote that a student has failed but can attend summer school and F to denote that they have failed but cannot attend summer school. (As in, they’ve utterly bombed the class.)
Some schools don’t even use F anymore. There’s no standardization, which is why most college applications usually require conversion to the 4.0 scale.
Apparently, this seems to be regional. My experience from Long Island:
Mama Crease taught 5th Grade for 30odd years. I even was “lucky” enough to attend the same school for 2 years. I remember watching her write (yes, hand write) out report cards. Grades were Excellent, Good, Satisfactory, Poor, and Unsatisfactory for Elementary School (Grades K-6 back then).
When I got to Jr. High, we went to the A-B-C-D-F system. Mama Crease said that was because 1) that was the system colleges used for transcripts and 2) the whole making an F into an E thing.
Looks like the answer is, “However the local school board/college administrators feel like doing it”.
Yup, my HS (Plainfield, IL) used A-E, E for fail. The University of Illinois also did. Looks like Illinois may be the odd ball. My HS switched to E around my Junior year though, I’m guessing that it occurred around the same time that use of computers became standarized, ergo they wanted the easy 5-1/A-E conversion for the software. Nowadays it probably isn’t as likely an arguement since the software can so easily do the conversion. I’m not sure why. Of course, the E was used on the report cards, but many teahcers, the majority, used the F when grading papers by hand. Another tidbit is that my HS was based on a 5.0 GPA scale,
As for why, I’m sure that the A-D is just a logical decision, but F for Fail is for effect. Considering that F is so close to the other letters, its isn’t unreasonable to use the initial as the bottom of the scale.
A better question would likely be why have we evolved into using a 5 letter system? I’d imagine it all began across the pond in England, one of many colonial reminants.
Some other trivia, my elementary school (which doesn’t seem very uncommon) used a E - Excellent, G - Good, F - Fair, S - Satisfactory, and U - Unsatisfactory grading system. Certain other criteria were given a +/- grade, similar to pass/fail in college. These second types were either special subjects or behavioral categories.
I’m pretty sure that somewhere in my career as a professional student I picked up an E at the local State University. In this case standing for ‘Excused Incomplete’. Basically a null grade with a one year extension to complete, otherwise it reverted to an F. I think it was General Entomology - My collection needed some serious additonal work .
Does the UofI still use the 5 point grading scale instead of the 4 point too? I know this was the case when my brother went there in the mid eighties. Seems like it could really help a solid B student to tell unknowing folks that they got a 4.0 at Illinois, which is one heck of a school btw.
A,B,C,D grades are not abbreviations for anything. They are a ranking order. The ranking order (in most schools, we acknowledge exceptions) is simply A thru D. While we might have seen creative words attached to these letter rankings, the letters do not represent part of a word, or an abbreviation. People have come up with creative meanings. The problem is that the letters stand alone, as a rating/ranking, period.
There is, however, one letter that IS an abbreviation, or stands for a whole word…and that letter is “F”, which stands for “Failing”. If the word for “not making the cut”, so to speak was “Zailing”, then the letter would be “Z”. In the English language, the word is “Failing” and the letter that represents the word is “F”. This has led to all sorts of conjecture about what happened to “E”, and what not. Nothing happened to “E”. E was never part of it. If the word was “Zailing” and we used a “Z” to denote a zailing grade, would we be left to debate what happened to all the letters in between? Hope not.
There you have it: E is just unfortunate to be caught between the letters A,B,C,D and “F”, wherein A,B,C,D are a ranking system and “F” is an abbreviation.
Get it? No “E”. A,B,C and D do not represent any word, yet “F” represents “Failing”.
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At my middle school (6-8th grade), there was an ‘E for effort’ grade. It basically meant that you did your homework and showed up to class, but were too dense to pass it. I never got one,(because I put in no effort) but at least 2 of my friends had E’s on their report cards. I don’t know how they figured in to the GPA.
In my high school here in Colorado we had the same meaning for E. It was reserved for the people that tried their darndest, but were too dense to justify a grade of D. I personally think they created E as a grade so that kids that really tried wouldn’t have their self esteem ruined by getting an F. In our gpa scale they were treated the same as F’s.
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