Spot on. The 'how do I get an A' question always seemed to be on the lips of everyone who never seemed to want to do the thing consensus reality suggested you m

Spot on. The 'how do I get an A' question always seemed to be on the lips of everyone who never seemed to want to do the thing consensus reality suggested you might have to do to get one (turn up, pay attention, work hard, ...) Computer Science, particularly, has a problem with bright students who managed to blaze through their first-year courses with a 4.0, expending absolutely no effort at all. This is because they already know how to program and are often inculcated with enormously broad knowledge of CS as compared with their peers. Many of them also know dangerous portions of typical second-year subjects - e.g. just enough to regard their second-year algorithms or operating systems courses as 'oh, this is just like first year, I know this'. Unfortunately, this often refers to the first 20-25% of the course, not all of it, and maybe not even that. Some of them never quite seem to recover and start regarding the marks they get as arbitrary personal judgements of their character ('you gave me a bad mark because I'm smarter than you and you hate me') or as failings in the system ('you gave me a bad mark because this course is in ML and ML is stupid'). Naturally none of this is helped by the fact that there are copious actual failings in the system. The hours of my software engineering course spent on the waterfall model (back in the early 90s), or mind-numbing lectures on the Seven Deadly Layers of OSI, are hours I'll never get back...