As students graduate high school and plan to take on the next milestone by attending college, some are often plagued with the naive belief that college will be the same as high school. For instance, in high school, some students may not have had to put much effort into achieving an A on a test, but, in college, grades are supposed to be rigorously earned. One should expect the standard would increase at a higher institution of learning in regard to academic success and the motivation to try.

We live in a world where numbers matter. We love to count, quantify and analyze anything and everything, including knowledge. A person’s grade point average is one way we do so. But a person’s GPA...