It's weird how many people on here attribute good grades to being good at everything else in life. Or minimizing the probable and unnecessary struggle some individuals go through to get those good grades because of the system they were put in. I got good grades because i worked many times harder than my peers. I shouldn't have to. No one does. I was privileged enough to have enough resources to do as well as i did. Most people with my condition don't. I've also struggled a lot more at other tasks, and in the work place. But i got good grades, so fuck me right?
Back in school I literally helped other students cram 30 minutes before a test, using flash cards I made and used all week, only to have them breeze in and get a higher score than me.
Do you know how great it would be to only barely try, and succeed anyway? I can't even imagine.
I breezed through high school, everything was easy, never studied, was never really able to just sit and focus on stuff.
Get to college, calc is hard. Physics is hard. Electronics is hard. I have zero skills from never studying; I have no foundation to learn. Didn't make it in college. Still really good at mental math though! Still can't sit and focus on tasks for long.
Hitting that wall is pretty common. You learn the wrong habits as you breeze through and get good grades without effort, then encounter the first subjects that require non-trivial effort. And then maybe you take some bad grades until you eventually learn, or you drop out and never figure out how to work through more difficult learning.
Some smart people might not hit that wall until pretty late (I know people who first encountered it in grad school), but regardless of when they encounter it, whether and how they get over that hump can determine what the rest of that academic path looks like for them.
I don't think it's that great. I was able to coast through high school but I was hindered once I reached the edge of my natural talent shortly into college. I had never really learned how to buckle down and study so I ended up struggling a lot. I can still pick things up pretty easily but I often give up when it gets to a certain point. Nowadays I feel kinda inferior to others that learned how to keep trying.
Yeah. It's so fucking shortsighted to be like, "Eh, you did fine, look at your grades. You can't be that disabled." Like, you putzes, are you kidding me? If I hadn't been spending all my mental energy clearing all these pointless obstacles, I might have cured fucking pancreatic cancer by now. It's not just about what's convenient for caretakers, teachers, and a health team, it's about being denied the opportunity that most other people are handed without asking to achieve everything they're capable of doing.