I think this very much depends on where you're going. I did not have a stellar GPA in school, but I did take the most challenging courses available to me and it

I think this very much depends on where you're going. I did not have a stellar GPA in school, but I did take the most challenging courses available to me and it's paid dividends for years. I still work on projects where my college exposure allows me to have a deeper understanding. Working with customers operating at scale, my (in retrospect, amazing) exposure to HPC and distributed computing has been so valuable. But these were the most challenging courses at a top 5 CS school, with some of the brightest researchers alive teaching course material. At another school that calculus is probably closer to what you're saying.