Or one can plainly tell the truth, like my SAT instructor used to say: you're competing against other people with similar capabilities to yours. If you don't bo

Or one can plainly tell the truth, like my SAT instructor used to say: you're competing against other people with similar capabilities to yours. If you don't bother to do the coursework, they'll get a higher score and you'll get a lower one, and it won't be because of some inherent reason, it will happen simply because they did take the time to study. (the SAT here is normalized to form a perfect Gauss curve, so essentially the only thing that matters is one's percentile, but I guess this saying is generalizable)