Basic Trope: The straight-A student gets a lower grade than expected.
- Straight: Alice is a straight-A student who gets a B in one subject. She panics and stresses about it for days.
- Exaggerated: Alice routinely makes perfect marks on everything she does. When she gets a "B" in one of her assigments, she has a mental breakdown the likes of which are usually reserved for manic-depressives who don't take their medication, ending with Alice having a Heroic BSOD (or a Villainous Breakdown, if she's the antagonist), taking a gun to school the next day to kill the teacher, or taking her own life when she gets home from school that day.
- Justified: Alice studies very hard and is proud of her high grades, so she takes it personally when she slips up.
- Inverted: Alice is a underachiever and proud of it. When her straight-F average gets bumped up to a D-, she freaks out and worries over being branded a "nerd" by her other anti-intellectual peers.
- Alternatively, Alice is a struggling student trying to raise her F-average, and gets excited when she musters up a "D-".
- Subverted: The "B" on Alice's report card was a misprint or computer error.
- Alice gets a B, and shrugs it off, to the shock of everyone who knows that she works hard to get straight A's.
- Double Subverted: The "B" on Alice's report card was a misprint or computer error. Turns out she was supposed to get a C.
- Alice gets a B, and shrugs it off, to the shock of everyone who knows that she works hard to get straight A's. In private, however, she has a mental breakdown.
- Parodied: Alice gets an A+, the highest grade possible, and complains that she didn't get an "A++".
- Zig Zagged: Alice gets a B on her report card, which was printed improperly; so she got a C instead. But everyone did so horrible in the class that all of their grades are being pitched upwards (or the class was graded on a curve), so she ends up getting an A anyway.
- Deconstructed: See "Exaggerated"
- Averted: Alice gets a B grade and takes it in stride.
- Lampshaded: "Oh, no! It's report card day. If Alice gets anything lower than an A, we're never going to hear the end of it."
- Invoked: Alice gets an A on a test, but Bob, a fellow student, switches the grade to a B, or changes her answers, knowing how she will overreact. Then asks Alice how did she do as the teacher is passing the tests back to the students. This sends Alice in a blind rage, yelling at the teacher and anyone else. Then later finds out that Bill tampered with her test.
- Exploited: Alice's Magnificent Bastard teacher intentionally gives her a B grade because he hates how much of a perfectionist she is and wants to see her suffer.
- Defied: "I got a B in Art? Well...just gotta study harder next time."
- Discussed: Alice is bragging about her 4.0 GPA. Her friends start to worry and talk to Alice about what she's going to do when she gets a B.
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The B Grade.
