The vain pursuit of brown-nosing academic excellency

Pass/fail is more important than "weeding people out" because the people you weed out are still there and you have to deal with them.

Any sort of preparatory or academic curriculum needs to be mastered satisfactorily and then it's time to move on to the next subject. There are too many valedictorians, salutatorians, magna cum laudes, and summa cum laudes, and various other honors and fraternities in school, and ISO 9001 garbage at work. Lawyers write up excessive wordy and useless contracts, and doctors make up gobbledy-gook diagnosis reports.

If there are some gentlemen pleasing the schoolmarms inordinately, it's the "sorry girls" talking about others.

‘A gentleman’s C’: Some conservative economists quibble with Trump’s ‘A+++++’ economy

Trump Gives Economy an ‘A++++’ - Inside Politics with Dana Bash and Manu Raju - Podcast on CNN Podcasts

Asked today what grade he’d give the US economy, President Trump responded,

CNN

Those people wear eyeglasses and braces all through school and they have 20/20 vision their teeth are all in perfect alignment until they have them all drilled and filled and capped and crowned and root-canalled and extracted professionally.

I have to build something, physically, not merely intellectually, to make money or be worth money. Whatever it is, I have to make it work when other people don't want it to work for me.

Whatever it is, I have to do a good job of it myself and thereby deprive many nice hard-working people of their income for doing it for me professionally and leaving me poor as a church mouse.