That’s not how our courses worked in the UK. No grades, just four 3 hour end of year exams (on two consecutive days), with hard questions that required leaps of intuition. The top students would get 30+ right across the four papers, good students would get about 13 right, average students 6 and to pass you needed 3 right. Diligence made very little difference (though you needed to study hard for several weeks before the exam to memorize all the techniques you’d covered during the year).
Not dissimilar in arts subjects: my spouse had to handwrite four original 8-10 page essays in each three hour exam.