How to Use flunk out in a Sentence

flunk out

verb
  • Not long after quitting football, Christie flunked out of school.
    — Kevin Sherrington, Dallas News, 25 Jan. 2020
  • Which is the best place to be during rush week, September, nobody’s flunked out yet.
    — Joey Morona, cleveland.com, 7 Aug. 2019
  • These questions look like they were prepared by a first year law student who flunked out for being patently stupid.
    — Fox News, 7 May 2018
  • But Martinez was never very good at school and flunked out halfway through 10th grade.
    — Daily Pilot, 15 July 2019
  • Jeffries-Cobb, daughter of an educator, flunked out her first year.
    — Alex Horton, Anchorage Daily News, 22 Mar. 2023
  • Nobody flunks out, and the consultant class self-perpetuates.
    — Sarah Jones, New Republic, 3 Nov. 2017
  • Candidates share amazing stories—everything from surviving cancer to almost flunking out of school due to peer pressure and drugs.
    — Debby Rice, The Mercury News, 6 Sep. 2019
  • Vivian Morris, who’s just flunked out of Vassar, probably doesn’t get her own allusion; Gilbert surely does.
    — David Gates, New York Times, 1 June 2019
  • This is the same Groff, who will graduate in December with a degree in Communications, who flunked out of school and missed a year.
    — Branson Wright, cleveland.com, 19 Oct. 2017
  • However, the study found grade inflation benefitted some students, specifically those at threat of flunking out.
    — Jake Angelo, Fortune, 19 Mar. 2026
  • The negative consequences may not be obvious at first, because the pass rates in these courses are very high and students who take them tend to graduate from high school instead of flunking out.
    — Susan Dynarski, New York Times, 19 Jan. 2018
  • Hill found that students in the bottom 25% of those admitted typically get less generous financial aid packages and are more likely to drop out or flunk out.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 7 Oct. 2019
  • When Danny is on the verge of flunking out and JD gets notified of imminent deployment, the two are forced to confront their shared grief that led them to these paths.
    — Sarah Yang, Sunset Magazine, 29 Sep. 2023
  • The main character, A’zion’s Kennedy, is a college student grieving over the loss of her father and flunking out of her summer semester for failing to attend class.
    — Andrew McGowan, Variety, 6 Sep. 2025
  • If competitive advantage has been gained through scholastic shortcuts taken on behalf of quasi-students who should have flunked out, how can that happen without significant sanctions?
    — Tim Sullivan, The Courier-Journal, 2 Sep. 2017
  • Weiss, a consummate tinkerer who once flunked out of college, wasn't the first person to think of using an interferometer to try to detect gravitational waves.
    — Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 3 Oct. 2017
  • Did Alcaraz intentionally flunk out of Miami?
    — José Criales-Unzueta, Vanity Fair, 12 May 2026
  • He was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 16 but flunked out after three years as a math major.
    — Mary Williams Walsh, BostonGlobe.com, 14 July 2018
  • But the sad, almost inevitable result is that the absent student will flunk out of college — attendance is one of the primary markers for success in the first year of college and for ultimate completion of the college degree.
    — Patricia McGuire, Washington Post, 1 Mar. 2018
  • In fact, about 90 percent of experimental treatments flunk out during clinical trials, either because they aren’t shown to be any more effective than the standard treatment or because their side effects are too severe.
    — Daniel Engber, Slate Magazine, 25 July 2017
  • If anything, competitive eating became just another way to fold in on myself like a piece of dough, to reframe the consumptive appetites that led to fights, a DWI, and stints of flunking out of college.
    — Krista Stevens, Longreads, 12 July 2024
  • The kid is flunking out of private school, has spearheaded a dozen or more extracurricular clubs, agitates to have Latin added to the curriculum, and directs a remarkably detailed stage production of Serpico.
    — Joe Reid, Vulture, 26 June 2023
  • He’s been locked up in MDC Brooklyn since October 2024, when Judge Diana Gujarati revoked his bond for flunking out of three drug treatment programs.
    — John Annese, New York Daily News, 12 Aug. 2025
  • In a recent survey of nearly 1,400 911 professionals, the National Emergency Number Association and Carbyne found that staffing issues are the biggest challenge for dispatch centers, including burnout, struggles to hire and retain staff and high reports of new hires flunking out of training.
    — Danya Gainor, CNN Money, 24 Aug. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'flunk out.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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