Basic Trope: A character gets an overly low grade, even lower than an F.
- Straight: Alice gets an F-minus-minus on her test.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice gets an F-minus-minus-minus-minus-minus-minus-minus on her test.
- Alice gets a Z-minus-minus on her test.
- Alice receives a skull and crossbones in place of a letter grade.
- Alice's teacher marks her exam paper F-minus. Then, as she watches, he runs it through the paper shredder.
- The teacher stands up, drops his pants, and defecates on the paper before returning it to Alice.
- The teacher pulls out a gun and plain shoots Alice.
- Alice gets a 0 on her test in place of a letter grade. She got absolutely nothing right, including the date.
- Alice gets a -1 on her test in place of a letter grade. She not only got everything wrong (including the date) but managed to even misspell her own name (somehow) and used a #3 pencil instead of a #2.
- Alice's grade is so bad it goes past Z into English letters no longer in use like Þ.
- Downplayed:
- Alice gets an F-minus on her test.
- Alice gets an F on her test with the note "see me after class" and there's a LOT more red marks than would be expected with a standard F.
- Justified:
- Alice procrastinated studying, so of course she got such a bad grade.
- Alice has an Improbably Low I.Q. ... or is just plain Book Dumb.
- Alice is attempting to get the lowest possible grade.
- The grade is specially reserved as a punishment for offenses like cheating, plagiarism, or extreme disruptiveness; Alice would've done better by not showing up at all.
- Troperistan goes all the way to Z, their F-- would be a B+.
- Its an In-Joke for Bad Programming.
- Inverted:
- Alice gets an A-plus-plus.
- Alice gets an S-plus, S usually being found in video games as combo ratings and not in actual tests as actual gradings.
- Subverted:
- The minuses were a misprint.
- This was a musical test reporting Alice played a detuned F.
- Double Subverted:
- She actually got an F-minus-minus-minus.
- But it turned out she flunked the test majorly afterall.
- Parodied:
- Alice gets an infinite number of minuses.
- Bob the Teacher creates an entire new letter of the alphabet just to use it as a grade for Alice's test.
- Alice gets the worst grade imaginable: an A-minus... minus.
- Alice sees the F-- on the test...but Bob the Teacher tells her that his last pen was running out of ink as he wrote it, and it's actually an A++.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Alice gets a C-minus-minus.
- Alice will regularly get A-plus-pluses in one class, but is absolutely awful at a different subject and records multiple scores of F-minus-minus. She's pretty good at a couple of other subjects, poor at another, and in her last class her performance is So Okay, It's Average.
- Averted:
- Alice gets an F with no additional qualifiers.
- Alice's school does not give letter grades.
- Enforced: "We need to show how stupid/lazy Alice is."
- Lampshaded: "I didn't even know grades went that low."
- Invoked: Bob wanted to test out his new F-minus-minus stamper, so he disinformed Alice.
- Exploited: Alice wants to be kicked out of a gifted program, so she gets an F-minus-minus.
- Defied:
- Alice, fearing the possibility of a grade that low, studies as hard as possible.
- The school board forces Alice's teacher to give Alice "pity marks".
- The school board makes clear that, even if such a grade actually existed, Bob is not allowed to use it. "F" is a grade bad enough for the students, "F" is a grade bad enough for his eccentricities, "F" is what he will give to students that deserve it and only then.
- Alice's teacher never gives grades that low, believing that it really does nothing to push his students to improve.
- Discussed: "You'd better study, Alice. Who knows what kind of low grades your teacher can imagine?"
- Conversed: "It amuses me how writers can think up grades that low."
- Implied:Carol: How'd you do on that test?
Alice: Not well.
Carol: F-minus?
Alice: Lower than that. - Deconstructed:
- Alice gets sent to a remedial class due to her low grade.
- Teacher Jim is told to get his head out of his rear end — such grades do not really exist in the local grading system and even if they did they would not be applied because it would just lead to students becoming depressed.
- Reconstructed:
- Alice doesn't care anymore and gets used to these low grades.
- Teacher Jim manages to defend himself by showing the representatives of the school system Alice's test and demonstrating it's such a huge collection of stupid that even kids in special class would not earn it — the only possible reason that remains, then, is that Alice is slacking off to such a huge degree that she needs a powerful kick to the pants.
- Played for Laughs:
- Alice has obscenely high standards for herself and erases the evidence of her eminently respectable scores out of sight of other people because she can only see how it could have been twelve thousand times better than it was.
- Alice gets an F-minus-minus in reading skills. She thinks she gets an A.
- Played for Drama:
- Alice's friends ostracize her due to her improbably low grades on tests.
- A grade of F-Minus-Minus does not exists at all in the local grading system. It's supplied as proof of Alice's teacher being such a huge sadist that he does not even cares about being caught.
- The school system created the "F-Minus-Minus" grade as a way to shock slackers and cheaters. Instead it opened a gateway to depressed students, destroyed lives, and a black market for said slackers fueled by students desperate enough to do anything to avoid getting such a black mark on their files.
The main page of F-- really should've been the founding entry at both the Self-Demonstrating Article and This Trope Name References Itself indices.
