When I was younger, grades were my way of measuring my worth. I was highly unpopular in school, constantly picked on, berated, beat up, you name it. So my grades were a way for me to still have a reason to keep my head high, because I did well in school. So I put my pride into my academic achievements.
Then came high school, where I majored in performing arts, specifically; drama. The environment there was very... well, I can't really describe it. We had a couple of girls there who saw themselves as the "best", the "leaders" of the class. They expected the rest of us to just follow their every whim - didn't exactly help that they also happened to be the drama teacher's pets, and they couldn't stop sucking up to him. Those two last years were what changed my opinion and dependance of grades. I mean, I still got pretty good grades, but it was under those girls and the drama teacher's reign, that they started meaning less and less to me personally.
In the beginning when we made specific performances, I felt part of it, I felt pride in what we did and the end result. I felt it made a statement and was a good performance altogether. Then as time passed, the "girls" sort of "took over" and decided to go with whatever was the strangest, most obscure type of performance (NOT because it had a specific meaning, but because the less the teacher understood our piece, the higher the grade he would award us). It got more and more meaningless to me personally, because we just threw together a bunch of stuff randomly, made the performance as weird as humanly possible and then made up a "deeper meaning" as a group. Quite frankly it was all bull... Some of our most meaningless performances were awarded top grades (some key words: chalk outline of clothes, tidying up on stage and washing the floor, while randomly spewing out poems, and the grand finale - dropping a piece of plastic between us and the audience... A+ indeed)
After that experience I just decided that the most important thing for me was to do something I could be proud of, regardless of what grade the teacher would award me.