Almost as early as you enter the school system, you are instructed to ensure that you work hard to get the best grades possible. Through course work and exams, grades are assigned and tallied to give an average. This average is typically used as a measure of how well you are performing or how well you are retaining the material.
While this system of measuring has seemed to work, one must question the extent to which it is a good measure of content retention. Technically, you can just put in the work when a graded assignment or exam is coming up and get good grades without retaining the content. Since this is the case, are the good grades more important than knowing the material? Frankly, both are important to different degrees for different reasons. See the discussion below.
Your Interests
When you consider the concluding years of high school and the duration of college, students are usually doing a prescribed course of study for a career path. This course of study requires learning disciplines that are relevant to the field, but also others that serve the purpose of personal development.
Good grades in either are essential to advancing in the course of study here so you should strive for them. However, you could possibly retain nor more than the general ideas that the personal development courses wish to convey. Additionally, you could also focus more on knowing the material that directly relates to the career you are pursuing as that is a huge determining factor in what you do in the working world after your educational tenure ends.
One suggestion is to make use of homework help online or on campus for your assignments so they can be done well, and you can focus more on studying and retaining what is necessary based on your interests.
Scholarships and Funding
This is one area in which grades are king. If you are hoping to land an academic scholarship at some point during your education, what is in your head does not count for much though you do get to articulate some of it during scholarship interviews.
To get shortlisted for an academic scholarship, the decision makers must be impressed by your academic performance and grades provide the only measure of this that they see fit to use.
Therefore, if you have any intention of being a scholarship beneficiary, it is a good idea to do your best to keep your grades up.
They Don’t Have to Be Exclusive
Above you were given one example where knowing material is more important and another where having good grades is more important. However, the two don’t need to be exclusive goals. It does not need to be a situation where your focus can only be on one but not the other. Some of the best students that have gone on to do great things in the world had both things going for them.
It’s not that strange when you think about it. Suppose, you decide to focus on just knowing the material that is presented to you or that which you research? Your assignments, projects and exams are typically based on that content. Therefore, by ensuring that you know the content, you stay a step ahead of the game and give yourself a better chance of completing these successfully.
Conclusion
Both having good grades and retaining course material are essential to getting a proper education. While there are scenarios that may favor one objective over the other, the two can be achieved by focusing on knowing the course material as it translates to better performances in graded areas. Additionally, if you want to eliminate the time it takes to complete assignments yourself, you can consider something like getting homework help online to allow you more time to familiarize yourself with the necessary material.