Any business school would flunk you in a minute for spending money on custom screws.
The headline of a recent article on Harvard Business Review: Marketers Flunk the Big Data Test.
Meanwhile, plenty of popular movies flunk the scientific literacy test. (See: 10 Films That Would Flunk Science Class).
Politicians, preachers, lawyers, bureaucrats and, one suspects, journalist-novelists like himself, also flunk his test of masculinity by engaging in namby-pamby occupations.
But shadow Treasury Minster Chris Leslie warned ministers not to "flunk the test when they get into negotiations" with their EU counterparts.
So, no surprise that when we incarcerate teenagers of today in traditional classroom settings, they react with predictable disinterest and flunk their literacy tests.
Asked at the start of the test, if would-be motorists flunk the questions it will count as one driving fault out of the maximum of 15 allowed before a fail.
Unfortunately, the continent's rulers are likely to flunk it.
The Massachusetts Board of Education, for example, fearing most students would flunk, has voted to set low passing scores--just above failing--for a new test students must take to graduate from high school.
More common are promising molecules that flunk clinical trials and so earn no return at all, or drugs that shine for a few months before being trounced by a better pill from a rival firm.
It would certainly flunk risk management.
WSJ: 'Why Companies Aren't Getting the Employees They Need': The Author Follows Up
In the event, for all the nastiness, buck-passing and back-biting this mass of material exposes, it only reinforces Mr Pollard's conclusions: that the BBC's lines of accountability were deeply flawed and that members of its lavishly paid and top-heavy management saw it as their priority, in a crisis, to flunk responsibility rather than take it.
Reynolds Tobacco (nyse: RJR - news - people ), Caterpillar (nyse: CAT - news - people ), Dow Chemical (nyse: DOW - news - people ), Cooper Industries (nyse: CBE - news - people ), Wells Fargo (nyse: WFC - news - people ) and Electronic Data Systems (nyse: EDS - news - people ), claims that more than two-thirds of existing plans at the biggest U.S. companies would flunk the new tests.
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