[fmora]

My experience has always been that people that do bad in school is because they simply don't work at it. Or that they've neglected years of school and suddenly studying really hard will not make up for all the years of neglect.

Cramming at the end of a semester will not help you at all. It has to be slow and incremental. Baby steps and it has to be consistent. If you keep this up for years eventually you get to a point where it seems that you are learning so much faster than everybody else but it really is just that you have been at it for years already and learning new information using the context of all the previous information makes it a lot easy to learn.

[philwelch]

At most schools that might be true. But it beggars belief that, for instance, any human being could graduate summa cum laude (or even magna cum laude) with an engineering degree at MIT when hundreds of lifelong hardworking and genuinely smart individuals try and fail at that feat every year. (Substitute for MIT any top-flight engineering program.)

[dcx]

I agree. It's inspiring to believe and act like anyone can do anything. But this boils down to the nature-nurture debate - how much of what you do is "built in"? Experimentally this always seems to come out in the 30-70% range. Given evolution, it's pretty much axiomatic that some people are better than others at certain things. It's hard to believe that hard work alone can defeat every sub-optimal genetic combination out there.

(I've met some of the people you describe also.)