A University of Massachusetts at Amherst student unhappy with his grade in a course responded in the American way and filed suit, according to The Boston Globe, but a court has now dismissed the case.

The student, Brian Marquis, a 51-year-old paralegal pursuing a B.A. in legal studies and sociology, was outraged over a teaching assistant’s decision to grade on a curve. That transformed Mr. Marquis’s A- in a political-philosophy course into a C.

In a 15-count lawsuit, filed in January against the TA and seven other defendants, Mr. Marquis alleged that the un-gentlemanly C violated his civil and contractual rights and intentionally inflicted “emotional distress.”

Last week a U.S. district-court judge in Springfield, Mass., threw out the case, but Mr. Marquis is considering an appeal. This is no mere open-and-shut case of grade-grubbing, he contends.

“This is not an issue of me walking into court and saying, ‘I don’t like the way this professor grades this paper,’” he told the Globe. “This is an issue where the empirical data was quite clear and convincing to any reasonable mind that my performance was well within a higher range.” —Paula Wasley