a comparison

All my students passed. One student, Vera Havalkina, achieved the highest grade on all her tests; she was the only one in the rayon to do so. Everyone else received the required minimum grade of 3 to pass. No one received a 2, basically because they aren't given. 1 out of 120 points will earn you a 2, and even the lowest grade was well in the clear with a whopping 23 out of 120 points. Amazing. One student bragged that he didn't even read the questions; he just filled in the answers - he got 34 points.
I ask myself if it was like this in American high school. I'm really not sure - I didn't see the gangsters, the pregnant teens, the drop-outs and the flunkies, even though I knew they existed somewhere on Temple High's "dark side" South Campus. Even then we joked that they finish faster than regular hard-working students, but i don't know what they had to do. Is America's system a joke about passing failures, too?