[Planktonne]

They got good grades by panic cramming the night before exams. I've had lots of students like that (I've even been a student like that) and in every case one thing is true: they would have accomplished more with less effort if they'd focused on learning to understand rather than trying to treat everything as a memorisation task.

[wdib]

I think there's a misunderstanding on your behalf. My chief complaint was about the poor educational quality of universities in my country (Jordan). Forcing students to study 5 years instead of the standard 4, or teaching you mandatory subjects irrelevant to your major are not things where I could have accomplished more with less.

Not going to university was not an option. It would have been the only way to guarantee work in my region.

[Planktonne]

> I had some of the highest grades in my class, but this came at the expense of learning very little about my actual courses. Getting good grades exclusively depended on your rote memorization skills the night before an exam. Not only do I remember nothing from what I studied, I detested every minute of every subject I took there. Passing subjects was significantly more important than understanding them.

I don't think I'm misunderstanding anything; you've been very clear. This is not a description of someone who was let down, but of someone who never had any interest in learning.