What is "made the grade"

Usage examples of "made the grade".

Surely, no sane highway engineer would have made the grade as steep as this or would have carved the two-lane so narrow that it looked more like a lane and a half.

His maternal grandmother had died at home when Sloat was a boy - it had taken her four years, but she had finally made the grade - and the smell of her dying had been like this.

Smaller and smaller fish were added to the lists of wanted men, simply because the lists gave so many men in so many countries a source of livelihood, and in the late fifties the name of Baron Wolfgang Friedrich Kastelbern von Altstein made the grade, Charge: war crimes.

I could have chosen any profession I liked, and if I made the grade I'd have gotten it.

That little cameo has just demonstrated to you why Art never made the grade.

He had sought to erase the theological indoctrination in a total contrast of commitment, a service so demanding that only a handful made the grade.