You got letter grades in high school? So you could get something like 1 in 10 answers wrong and still get a perfect grade? Lol, what a joke.
Pass/fail, letter grades, four point scales, even percentages, all of these do the same thing. They group actual scores into categories. You can choose those categories based on what you think the uncertainty in the evaluation scheme is, or meaningful performance bands, or just chopping an unknown distribution into arbitrary equal-sized chunks ("any statistician would tell you").