Maybe, as you said, your branch is different. The way we were told to do things in initial training, and the way things were done at my branch (which was the same as what we’d been told in initial training) was that you don’t fail kids. In fact, you don’t give them below a certain score. The results of that were that I inherited fairly high level classes where the students not only couldn’t speak coherently to me during the breaks, but some of them were clearly a couple of levels below the class they were in. I would write the marks students got on the tests I corrected and a week later, the markbooks would have been changed to a far higher score. This is/was a problem because the parents were basically being told their kids were at a certain level, when they clearly weren’t. The parents were certainly complicit to a certain extent, but Hess and some (many?) of its employees were the problem too.