"Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent ex

"Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?" Well it depends on what school is for. To be perfectly honest, I'd say that organization and scheduling my time properly and working hard are far more important in college and in the workplace than mastery of subject matter that's ultimately outside my career field. I don't use what I learned in Physics or Calculus or German at my job or in my life, but I need to be organized and schedule my time (work time and personal time) effectively on a daily basis. "The percentage of students who attend college is rising; 67 percent of high school graduates now enroll in some sort of post-secondary school after graduation (up from 43 percent in 1973). But the reality is that many don’t succeed, in large part because they are not academically prepared." I don't know if it's because they don't know the material or because they aren't able to adjust to working as hard or managing their time as effectively. From my perspective (entering college in 2005) it was generally the case that students had gotten used to skating by because they could get A-'s without trying and then ran into trouble in college, not that students who had worked hard but weren't as smart were getting too overwhelmed to get good grades. Personally, if I had gone into college with less material knowledge and better organizational/management skills, I'd wager my GPA would have been like a point higher or something. Disclaimer: I was absolutely one of those "knew the material, scrambling to finish homework as the teacher was collecting it" types in HS, so my grades suffered relative to a purely "material mastery" metric.