A Failing Grade Hasn’t Always Been an “F”

Getting an “F” in school to represent failure or flunking hasn’t always been the case. At one point, an “E” was the lowest grade you could get.

Assigning a letter grade to schoolwork can be traced back to 1897 at Mount Holyoke College, an all-women's university in Massachusetts, which was the first to use such a system. The lowest grade you could receive at the college was an “E,” which meant “failure.” Only a year later, the college changed the “E” designation to an “F.” Other schools followed this letter-grading system or some variation in the years to follow, but the “E” letter grade was slowly phased out completely by the 1930s.

But why, might you ask? It’s believed it was because of fears that students would misinterpret the grade to mean “excellent.” It seems that should be a good reason why they should be receiving an “F” in the first place.

Before the time that Mount Holyoke issued their grading system, grading a student’s performance varied. In the 1800s, many colleges had their own point scale that fit students into groups based on performance, or they used their own grading point scale. Going back even farther, colleges in the U.S. used the Oxford and Cambridge model. This simply determined that if the student had completed the course and shown mastery of the material based on what the professor, or a group of…