Made me ask if we know competition is what pushes us on, why do we love to get out of it. I mean most of us have been through two gruelling years (doesn't matter how much you actually studied, those were years of uncertainty and competition) to get into the colleges we are in now. And then we started discovering life for all it could be.
What developed slowly was a hard feeling towards tests and then towards people who fared well, the former seemed to stop us from having fun and the latter just proved to us that we weren't as good we thought at the only things we knew, hence the introduction of sarcasm. With time we found others who shared this opinion and we all gave each other the confidence that success in exams isn't everything.
I agree, it is not. But the reason we dropped out of the race was because we decided not to compete and get mauled. I know it is near-impossible to quantify every single activity that you do in terms of worthiness and generate a cumulative score for comparison between a me and my branch topper. No university I know does that. But even if we could do that, are we sure we have done a lot to risk putting ourselves in for comparison.
The question is why do we hide from the fact that we dropped out of the race using these mysterious other activities as an excuse with the real reason being the unwillingness to fight. I'd love to quote examples from people I know to validate my points, those who left everythign to follow their passion, those who didn't find a passion just to continue studying, as well as those who have aced both. You could bring them to prove yours. That doesn't solve the problem, which is the attitude shift from fighting it out on the pitch to settling in the audience.
How did we become losers, worse quitters? Of course, decrying the system is and shall always be cool. Should we recreate competition and performance benchmarks?