My elementary school (70s) used a combination of 1-4, with 1 being "great job" and 4 being "fail," and Exceeds/Meets/Doesn't meet standards, depending on the subject. Academic subjects got 1-4, with handwriting, participation, behavior, and a long list of other things that were mostly soft skills in the other group.
We got traditional letter grades in junior high and percentages in high school (80s), with a scale to convert to A, B, etc. My high school's cutoff for an A was 93%.
My profoundly gifted kid, who finished 1st grade reading at a 6th grade level and doing mutiplication/division/fractions/square roots received all 3's on his final report card. How that possibly described him as a student in any way is beyond me. I had a long, hissy email conversation with his (horrible) first grade teacher until I just gave it up as pointless.
Let me guess: he didn't do all possible first grade stuff, followed by getting everything right on some large portion of second grade stuff, and therefore she has no way of knowing if he'd truly surpassed first grade expectations. Because, some things are just unknown?
