I don’t know if those grade thresholds were exactly the same back in my day; I believe gpa averages were generally lower back then. The one friend of mine who was seriously scraping those lower levels really received a lot of leeway from the college. They went to substantial effort to help him get through.
My knee-jerk reaction was if somebody is doing that poorly maybe they should be in a different major, or a different engineering school at least. But then thinking about it, that guy wound up having a very good career.