[bigstrat2003]

Not really. If they got admitted to Stanford to begin with, they are smart enough to succeed if they put in the work. So what they are actually trading off against is "I don't want to do the work", which is far less defensible than your reading of the situation.

[johnfn]

You are conflating some abstract notion of "succeed"ing (what does that even mean, how can I measure it to two decimal places?) with a very concrete notion of "do this simple thing or get a worse GPA".