[mduvall]

Everybody in college pretends to be not working hard as they like to admit, thus the advice that comes from colleagues along the lines of "don't do the homework, it's really a waste of time" when everybody is actually doing it, could screw you over. It didn't mess up my life per se, but definitely had an impact on my grades when I was a naive freshman.

[nostrademons]

It's funny, all the advice I had from upperclassmen when I started college was "do your homework and go to class", and I did neither, and I don't regret it at all. Yes, it hurt my grades. However, I've found that my grades haven't mattered at all.

[l0nwlf]

I am graduating from CS, currently in my final year. GPA does matters a lot when you are a fresher. Companies which visit universities for hiring (Campus recruitment drive) places a GPA cutoff, henceforth making low GPA fellas ineligible to even appear in their hiring process. All the big guns do so (Google, Y!, Amazon etc etc).

[hackerblues]

Given grades are correlated with having understood the material, I assume the implication is that the material you might have learned but didn't hasn't been at all relevant.

[nostrademons]

It's more that understanding the material is a necessary but not sufficient condition for getting good grades. It's quite possible to understand all the material and still get bad grades.

[ronnier]

I never thought grades mattered much either, until recently. I was asked my GPA a few weeks ago.

[nostrademons]

I was asked my GPA at my first job, told them (it was bad), then they made me an offer anyway.

[frankus]

If there's anything you don't want as a role model in college, it's the mythical "slacker genius" (I say mythical because pretty much everyone who falls into this category is either a work of fiction or someone who works both hard and efficiently). Go to class, do the homework, study (and if you don't know how, learn!). If you get good at those things, there's plenty of time left over to have fun.

[Jach]

> Everybody in college pretends to be not working hard as they like to admit

Is this true when it's a student telling the outside world? It's a useful strategy to claim one's working really hard in school to explain why he hasn't been calling / doesn't want to visit over spring break / doesn't have a girlfriend / why the parents should keep sending money / etc.

[masterj]

> Everybody in college pretends to be not working hard as they like to admit

My experience was the exact opposite. People liked to compete to see who had the most coursework to do. People would complain about having to pull all nighters, but still spend hours on youtube or facebook beforehand. Some people were genuinely overwhelmed with work, but it was never downplayed as far as I could tell.

[hackerblues]

I have been told that it might be a cultural thing by someone who has studied in the UK and the US. US = overplay amount of work done, UK = under play it.

[nradov]

You should treat college homework and studying as a constrained optimization problem. Decide up front how many hours you're going to put in per weak and then figure out how to maximize your GPA within that limit. In the remaining time you can do whatever you want.