The present case study is part of a larger project where the overall ambition is to understand how an organization, through its way of arguing for the failures in student teaching, at the same time constitutes what is accepted as sufficient teacher quality. The article examines the students short comings from the supervisors and teacher educators perspectives. The analysis shows that the indicators of failure include passivity and rigidity, lack of posture, social timing and selfawareness. The indicators can be categorized into two groups of failures, "those that are of too light weight" and "those carrying some weight". Critical for the categorization was the time for the discovery of the short comings as well as the assessors' experiences of hope for development. The result is then set in relation to the on-going discussion in Sweden about the possibility of introducing an aptitude test before admission to teacher education.