having and maintaining a very high GPA, is indeed hard-work. If an individual decides to invest their time in CGPA maxxing what's their incentive? (incentive is what they think and not what's actually true)
- being apart from crowd
- parental satisfaction
- ego satisfaction
- surety higher chances of success compared to peers
these high GPA clowns tend to overfit for the tests and not learning, Learning only occurs with challenging creative tests, which don't force you to memorize and critical thinking being the main theme of the test.
in low-tier college scenario (most colleges in india) later is often not the case, so you end up sacrificing time, in memorization without challenging the facts you're learning itself.
all of that should be common sense, let's talk even if they are aware of what they are doing is not learning why one might still aim for a higher GPA as their motive.
as we know the exam in low tier college has no intention to testing critical thinking, investing time to actually learn can be counter productive and is much harder cognitive task, people tend to optimize thinking that they could possible learn it anytime when they need, or that they don't need such 'depth' of knowledge right now and subject is not relevant to them.
I'll address relevancy later but this is a clear trap, even if the system is set in a way, to provide worse education, utilizing it for learning rather than exploiting it for marks is much better. one clear difference is that marks exploitation results in marks through the way of 'cheating' ei. not grasping what you had to according to learning objective of the course, and covering the bare-minimum depth of each topic, a total waste of time. why? simply because of low cognitive effort being put, what else has low cognitive effort? short-form content, binge watch TV, basically passive media consumption. This is passive learning trap in disguise of college academics, No one fucking waits for a second and think "wait, why is that?" simply because you are not required to. the tests do not challenge you enough in such a way to consider such things next time.
with that out of the way, question that I want to address, what if the subject itself is not relevant or that I'm not interested, well first nothing you do for the first time instantly will interest you, especially in academics, after investing sometime reading exploring, after unable to discover even a hint of why this subject might be taught. at that point its best to ignore the subject not put any time into it as it may be the program in-charge's fault for not knowing the fuck. Pull a last day clutch and pass the subject.
okay at this point you might know why I don't give a fuck about CGPA and neither should you then, a question arises, why don't we just study what we truly want ignore all the subject at once? short answer is that, do that if you are smart enough and can make your own curriculum, beware of the rabbit holes, but in the end there's no loss in learning the basics of the degree what you paid for, and a good mixture of both is pretty healthy enough.
all doubts addressed, the CGPA farmers reluctance to comprehend long term gain is astonishing, they not only set higher expectations of themselves but indirectly force others around them to do the same.
But what's the issue if you can maintain high CGPA while you are in college, get into company and learn things from there in your life. only fact you'll ever learn in the company is your ass being whooped day and night. If you couldn't do it here, you wouldn't with responsibilities and non academic environment.
At least some F students are better than most high CGPA clowns because at least the end up pursuing a unique careers. finally let me truthbomb why companies despite knowing you won't know shit (as the wasting time in meaningless academic pursuit) and possibly lower IQ (reluctance to change strategy because of sunk cost fallacy), prefer high CGPA clowns. because this measure shows nothing but the measure of obedience and algorithmic optimization (rote memorization), How well you can obey orders, is exactly what company wants.
at last I'm not gate-keeping the fact that CGPA is being used a filter for on campus placement, but is it worth sacrificing your exploration time and intellectual ability, which may be what ultimately save you when your ass didn't get into high competitive campus placement drive, your human individuality is what sets you apart not CGPA.