[Tetraman]

For 174, it is the school's policy that students with a grade average of 69 or lower are not allowed in extracurricular activities unless they get proper signatures and approvals. Not the team's policy, but the school's. Part of FIRST is learning and succeeding in school. If your grades drop too low either during or before FIRST season (and trust me they do) then you are taking the team too seriously and not your school work - which should be taken just as or even more seriously. It makes sense to encourage students to continue to work hard in school as they attend 3-5 meeting sessions a week for robotics. And if one of those ways is to give them an ultimatum on being kicked out if their grades are too low, then have at it.

Our team dislikes an application process, and because of our high mentor count and time given to use the facilities, we use pre-season meetings and lectures to determine which students aren't taking the little things seriously, and then cutting based off of that. Not all teams have this luxury.

Anyway, everything is a learning process - think of the kinds of applications these students fill out for their part time jobs and how they can word things right to get the job or word things wrong to get overlooked.

tl;dr - Every team is different. Every team works with their own system and that system is going to be much different than your team's system. That doesn't mean it is wrong, it just means it is different.