I was studying business/project management full-time while running a couple companies. My biggest beef was that the grading scale rewards consistent mediocrity

I was studying business/project management full-time while running a couple companies. My biggest beef was that the grading scale rewards consistent mediocrity over inconsistent excellence - basically the opposite of the real world. Out in the wild, let's say you run three advertising campaigns. Each costs $1,000. Two return almost nothing - utter failures. The third returns $9,000. In the real world, you've got +$6,000 and you've tripled your money. In academia, you've got an average of 33% and you've failed the course. The problem is, once an assignment is "near perfect" and gets an A, there's nothing to separate "excellent" (an "A") and the "best paper ever put together in this topic" (...also an "A"). In the real world, you can do excellent work and make $100,000 in a year, or do the best work ever done in a field and make millions. Academia has a mild learning component and a significant credentialing component (it is a major plus, and I do look at degree/grades when hiring), but the atmosphere is not conducive to experimentation and prioritization - two crucial skills for making it big in the real world. Passing heavy homework-laden courses shows you can take orders and execute on them sufficiently well and consistently, which has some value for people who want to be employees, but considerably less value for people who want to do great things. A mix of real world learning from experiences, and accumulating some credentials in other ways is more and more becoming a viable option.