As a student, grades are your primary means of gauging how well you're doing in school. You hope for A's and B's, and perhaps you could live with an occasional C; D's and F's are out of the question! But what about E's? What happened to the E when this grading scale was created?
First of all, there is no federal grading system. No politicians or committees on Capitol Hill sit around deciding what it means to get an A. A school's grading scale is decided at the state and township level, and sometimes by individual schools, especially in the case of private schools and colleges and universities. In fact, some liberal arts colleges have done away with letter grades completely so that students can concentrate on learning the material instead of "making the grade."
And this E-less grading scale isn't the only one around. In many countries, schools rely solely on numbers to represent a student's success, using a 10- or 20-point scale. Other countries do use letter systems, but different ones. For example, one South African grading system gives the grades A, B, C, D, E, F, FF, G, and H. The European Credit Transfer System, designed to facilitate international college and university transfers, uses the grading system A, B, C, D, E, Fx, and F. In this system, you must get an E or above to get any credit. An Fx indicates that you must do some more work to earn credit.
The E-less grading system isn't even the only grading system used in the United States. Until the mid-20th century, the E-S-N-U system was the most popular. In this system, the letters stood for the following:
E = Excellent
S = Satisfactory
N = Needs improvement
U = Unsatisfactory or Unacceptable
You still see this system used in some elementary schools, especially in the first few grade levels, and often with the inclusion of "I" for "Incomplete."
The common use of the E-S-N-U system reveals what happened to the missing E in the common U.S. grading system today. The E was already being used as the top grade; having the highest "excellent" grade suddenly become the lowest grade could be confusing. So that letter was skipped, and the lowest grade became the dreaded F.
And it didn't hurt that F is the first letter in such apt words as failed, flunked, faltered, floundered, flopped, and finished.
