It's not as simple as "just doing the work." I wish I could do part-time but I'm being pressured due to time and money limits to take the max hours each term. That's bad news for me because this rathole is filled with people who can coast through life with no effort; or rich bookworms who have no obligations outside class and can easily study 10, 12 or 14 hours a day. GPA is just a measure of how much time was on your hands.
My classes are filled with crooked professors who give favors to class ass-kissing suckups and go math-nazi on anyone else. I once had this ******* give me 0 credit for an amplifier design I got perfectly right simply because it had a typo (junk writing that I forgot to erase) that suggested current was coming out of a MOSFET gate. Everything else matched the answer key exactly. Zero Credit is supposed to mean you got everything wrong or skipped the problem. When I confronted him, he refused to change the grade. I hope he gets hit by a truck.
If they're not crooks, they're just stubborn. My junior year was fraught with senile old fools who reject any work that reflects any trace of independent thinking or out-of-class instruction. If it doesn't match the answer key--its wrong. Nevermind that the circuit works the same or the equation yeilds the same answers--its just wrong. End of story. They'll do anything to keep people like me out the profession.
"Do the work." Yeah I've been there. I do nothing but work and I still get crappy grades. Even when things seem to finally be improving, I fall right back down rock bottom. It's infuriating. I can't win, and if quit, my life would only get worse. If I hear one more know-it-all bragging about how perfect their grades are, I'll kick out their teeth and shove them down their throat so god damn hard, they'll have to sit on food to eat it. :evil: