That was my MO during college, and it seems to have worked pretty well for me ;)
Some companies though, will refuse to look at a resume, regardless of how richly experienced it may be, simply based on the fact that you failed to hit an arbitrary bar during college. To me this is lunacy.
If you were putting yourself through college, paying as you go, then as long as you managed a low "B" I'll probably cut you a break. You'll get a fair shot.
If you decide to skip college and throw yourself into work, I'm not going to hold it against you. That being my background, I generally see it as a plus.
If you went to college on someone else's dime, your parent's or the bank's, and have such a weak work ethic you couldn't be bothered to apply yourself then odds are you aren't going to bring anything special to the table at the work-place.
I'm sure there are a lot of cases where it's not fair, but there's few things that annoy me more than an inflated sense of entitlement, and for good reason. In my experience it's a great indicator of a poor performing employee. Generally with drama, generally thinking a lot of themselves despite negligible contributions to the business.
There's a disconnect here. You're falsely associating "average marks" with "didn't apply yourself", which simply isn't true, particularly in our field (I'm assuming you're in software).
I wasn't blessed with an unusually powerful intellect. I knew guys in college who would just get the course material after a couple of hours. For the rest of us earning marks meant many dozens of hours pounding a book, and at that point you run across the very real limitation of having 24 hours in a day.
The vast majority of college students have to make a very real tradeoff - marks vs. practical experience. For me, I chose not to invest dozens more hours to eke out 10% more on the exam, and instead chose to put it into hacking on relevant projects that taught me new technologies.
My marks were certainly not poor, they were perhaps 1 std. deviation above average. Decent, not great. Could they have been higher? Sure, but I'm no ubermensch, it would've meant a large sacrifice in another area.
If that's your image of a student not applying himself, then guilty as charged. I for one don't regret it for one second - after all, I hacked out a lot of stuff in those 4 and a half years (paid my way through schools by not having summers and staggering internships between semesters instead), and had a number of offered before graduating thanks to it. I'd hate to imagine my position if I'd just stuck to acing the school work and never hacking anything on my own.
Again, this goes back to my original point: companies that weigh marks heavily in recruitment are making a lot of fundamentally unreliable assumptions and rejecting candidates (before interviews, even) on what is IMHO a weak correlation to on-the-job performance. With the exception of a small minority of extremely smart people, someone with top marks had to sacrifice something major to get there, and in my experience that "something" is often something that gravely impacts employability.
In this case, perhaps this issue should be raised internally at NVidia. I for one didn't even bother applying, since having interned at companies that filtered strongly by grades, this was a major red flag.
Candidates with significant work experience - even ones still in college - are in high demand everywhere and have a lot of choices. Even a non-ninja-rockstar-guru like me had internship offers piling up outside the door. In this case it would benefit the company to not put things into job ads that don't actually matter.
Some companies though, will refuse to look at a resume, regardless of how richly experienced it may be, simply based on the fact that you failed to hit an arbitrary bar during college. To me this is lunacy.