This Is Why You No Longer Need To Achieve ‘A’ Grades
Back in my university days, I, like many other people, was guided by a firm conviction that good grades were everything.
Both my parents and my teachers kept insisting that high achievement would help me unlock all the important doors of this world. A high score is the key to a successful life!
And I blindly believed those words…
I remember the time when I used to drive myself to exhaustion with studies, simply in order to get a high score in an exam.
And it all seemed to make sense. But now I don’t want my son to study as hard as I used to at his age.
This might sound strange, but let me explain my point of view.
1. No one’s ever asked me about my grades.
No employer ever asked me about my achievements at university!
No résumé I’ve ever had to complete contained a field entitled “Performance at University.“ However, all of them had one entitled ”Work Experience.”
Even more surprising is the fact that my computer skills and my sports achievements lend considerably more weight to my job applications than my university grade sheets.
2. I’ve forgotten everything I learned at university.
My memory works in an exceptional way: I used to forget all the course material immediately after the exams. When I first started working, I realized that in all my years at university I hadn’t learned anything.
And, even though my grades indicated otherwise, my academic knowledge was a complete mess — scraps of information that I knew neither how nor where to apply.
As it turned out, years of exceptional university performance didn’t give me any advantages over “less-educated” people.
In the end, my first two months of hands-on work experience gave me more useful knowledge and helped me acquire more professional skills than the previous five years at university spent in pursuit of good grades. So was it worth trying so hard for so long?
3. The pursuit of good grades harmed my health.
Some people can grab everything on the fly, but I’m not one of them. To make knowledge stay in my head, I had to learn the material by heart. In the run-up to an examination period, I used to revise for 12-15 hours a day. I still remember falling asleep during lessons and on public transport because of severe exhaustion.
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