I didn’t study so many years ago, but remember my professors clearly saying that the highest vote was reserved for excellence and not just knowing the subject.

I only had one such professor at my university, and he was widely feared and disliked by the students for it. He tended to be especially dreaded by the high-GPA types who were accustomed to getting at or near 4.0 GPA just for adequacy and feared that his class alone would be enough to crack their perfect record.

(Ended up having to take no less than four classes from him. But, by the time I was partway through the 2nd class, I’d pretty much figured out what he meant by ‘excellence’ – it’s of course different for every teacher – and I was still able to get excellent grades in those classes. In fact, by the last class I had with him, I was able to slack off and bullshit my way through insufficiently researched papers and still get a good grade in his class … which is a bit ironic, given his reputation as a hard-ass and a stickler for details. But by that point, I’d figured out what details he was looking for and, more importantly, what he wasn’t looking for. However, on the whole, I do think I learned some valuable things in his class, even if much of that was just ‘how to speak academic’.)