Study for learning, not for grades

Focusing too much on grades makes education stressful and boring. But focusing on learning new things makes education fun and also leads to better grades. Also, learning things properly is more important than having good grades.

As a metaphorical example, let’s consider medical education. Regardless of whether you are a medical student or not, this example will clarify my point. Think about a medical student who studies only focusing on his/her grades. Instead of reading the book and following lectures, the student focuses more on gathering previous year’s exam questions and solve them. Solving last 5-10 years of questions more or less guarantees passing in the exam. The student did the same for all the courses. Now, after 5 years of education, the student became a doctor. One day you appear as the student’s patient. After describing your job, suddenly the student starts to google because s/he never heard of such a combination of symptoms because it was not part of the question sets s/he studied during school years. How would you feel in such a situation? Think about a scenario where its an emergency situation and the doctor do not have a clue about the problem because of not learning properly in school days?

What if you are boarding on a plane and your pilot also studied the same way? Now, do you feel like putting a little bit more effort into leaning instead of just solving last few years question sets? You may argue that in social science the probability of killing someone is much lower. Let’s assume you worked well enough to be in managerial position of a company. Suddenly, one day things went wrong and you have to make a crucial decision within 10 minutes and the future of the company depends on your decision. But you are not familiar with such situation because when the lecturer was discussing a similar example in-class, but you thought you could read everything from book/slides and there is no point in attending a 3 hours lecture. You also did not care to ask your classmates what has been discussed in the class.

I hope this makes it clear why we should focus more on learning than grades. If you learn good, you are likely to get a higher get too. And regardless of what grade you get, you will go great in career and life, I guarantee you.