My son who is a freshman on the highest math track at one of the best high schools in US got an A- in his Adv Algebra. The 93.5 is the lowest grade in his 7 classes (three A+; three A and one A-). We set up a conference with the teacher to find out what went wrong first. The math teacher first said that there was not problem for a A- in the hardest math course with a mix of freshmen to Juniors students. We pressed on and asked to review all the data. It turns out; my son is less efficient in translating a word problem into math equations. With that finding, we added extra exercises of the same topic in his home work.
The result – he got a 99 on his first test in 2nd Q. All happy.