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.
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.