Basic Trope: For some reason, a character goes to school with people at least a year younger than they are.
- Straight: Bob is only starting high school at the age of fifteen.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is demoted from 5th grade to 4th grade.
- Bob is only starting high school at the age of twenty.
- Despite being an adult with a driver's license, Bob hasn't made it out of elementary school.
- Bob is held back all the way to preschool, before being expelled.
- Bob is 95 years old and still hasn't made it past kindergarten.
- Downplayed: Bob is one year behind in school because his parents felt he wasn't ready to start kindergarten with everyone else who was around five at the same time.
- Justified:
- Bob is a grade behind in school because he did not test well enough to advance from the third grade the first time.
- Bob’s parents signed him into elementary school a year after he was 7. This is why he starts high school at age 15.
- Bob reached Compulsory School Age just after the previous school year started, his class mates just before this one started.
- The Dean Bitterman in charge of Bob's school sabotaged Bob's grades just to spite him.
- Bob initially couldn't afford to go to school, even public school, while he was still in the Compulsory School Age. Now that he's in his mid-to-late teens with enough money to get by, he opts for high school first.
- Inverted: Bob is a Grade Skipper.
- Subverted:
- Bob scored 50 on an IQ test, but he does well enough in his grade to move up.
- Bob is younger than he looks.
- Double Subverted:
- Bob scores 50 on an IQ test, but he's not failing anything; he just had a bad day, or the computer glitched up and mixed up his results with one of the "slow" kids. Regardless, he is retained in school.
- Bob is younger than he looks, but still fell back by one grade (even though it looks like he lost four).
- Parodied:
- Bob gets held back because the high school wanted to keep him around to play football longer.
- Bob is Really 700 Years Old who stopped growing during childhood, but he has to repeat his current year over and over with kids he looks like age-wise, even though he is ready to be promoted.
- Bob's children are adults who have jobs at the school while their dad is still unable to pass his current grade.
- Zig Zagged: Bob gets Held Back, but then, years later, becomes a Grade Skipper.
- Averted: Bob is seventeen and entering his senior year of high school.
- Enforced:
- The need for a character who can make double entendres without coming across as particularly creepy adds sixteen-year-old Bob to the cast of middle-schoolers.
- A Hand Wave for obvious Dawson Casting.
- Lampshaded: "Isn't it strange that we're all eight but we hang around with a kid twice that age? He should be in high school."
- Invoked: A character applies this trope to his or her child after learning that his or her test scores are far below the other children's scores.
- Exploited:
- Due to his grade retention, Bob does some really immature things and pretends he doesn't know better.
- Bob has gone through puberty, while his classmates have not. As a result, he can help the teacher keep the other students in check with his surprisingly deep voice, and nobody tries to mess with him. Bonus points if he's still irregularly tall for his age even then.
- Through no fault of his own, Bob is held back by a private institution that wants to get extra tuition revenue from his parents.
- Defied:
- A school administrator says, "I know they leave all the dumb kids behind in fiction, but all children should have peers their own age."
- Bob tries his best in school so as to graduate in good time.
- Discussed: "I know that Bob's already a teenager, it doesn't necessarily make him the dumbest person in the whole school."
- Conversed: "There's always an annoying Manchild in every Kid Com."
- Implied: Despite the fact that it's never stated that Bob was Held Back in School, the actor playing Bob looks like he's twenty years old, and it's canon that Bob shaves, drinks, and smokes.
- It's been stated that Bob is older than what is considered normal for the his grade.
- Deconstructed:
- Bob becomes depressed after realizing that he has been classified as immature.
- Bob failing all of his classes makes him a laughing stock among his peers.
- Reconstructed:
- Despite having poor grades, Bob isn't interested in learning, and continues his goofing around normally.
- Bob's parents decide to move him to a school for special-needed children, and he start performing better in school, even slightly better is enough to make him feels less depressed.
- When his peers mock him, he points out their hypocrisy, since bullying makes them more childish than he is.
- Played For Laughs: The series focuses on Bob being just One of the Kids.
- Played For Drama: The series focuses on the isolating elements of it, or Bob's feeling demeaned by having peers so much younger than himself.
Sorry, Alice, but you'll be Held Back in School this September. Until then, enjoy your summer vacation, and I will try to help you advance yourself.
