seldom is the question asked: is our children failing?

Why use the letter grade at all? Your grade is your grade wherever it falls between 0 and 100.

his name was uumlaut variableson.

I bet Aske never got an F!

I bet Aske was a mini Alex J Keaton when is came to school grades.

Speaking of 50, I got a 50 on my mid-term exam in partial differential equations. But fortunately, so did most of the class. The professor was a *goshdarn* hard-ass that gave no partial credit on an exam problem--even if you made a simple arithmetic error. His reasoning was that you don't get partial credit for engineering a bridge that falls down. But if you're a civil engineer, you know that in real-life bridges don't fall down because you over-engineer the *feces* out of them. That's why he was a math professor and not an engineering professor. After enough students complained to the dean about this professor's grading policy (which didn't jibe with those of other professors), he eased up slightly on the final exam. I still ended up with C-. Luckily, I recovered. The next year, I took a graduate-level class on flight structures that actually applied PDE, and I got an A. *goshdarn* math professors.