So, as background on me, I'm a 16-year-old student studying maths/bio/chem from the UK. I have always been known within my school, though this is nothing special, to be able to thrive with raw intellect and have done so from the moment I joined, up to this point. I learn and (most importantly) understand concepts rather quickly in most cases, so I seldom revised to try to prop up a lack of understanding, as said lack of understanding didn't exist. I have a good memory, so retaining content is not particularly difficult and often doesn't require too much further thought. As of late, though, with the onset of A-levels, I am slowly finding this to not be the case anymore. However, it's now difficult to motivate myself to revise as all the study skills others accumulated over time, the ones who couldn't do well without revision, were able to develop those skills and thrive in an A-level setting, whereas I, a student who never had to develop study skills up to this point, am now struggling to keep up somewhat.
I feel as though part of why I had this kind of issue in the first place is because of the way our education system works. First of all, the obvious thing here is that absolute scores do not matter at school. I understand having a grading system is useful considering that not all students of a subject take the same test for that subject. Grades allow for the level of the test to be accounted for through the relativistic grade boundaries provided, which is useful in terms of determining the skill of a student irrespective of the test they took. However, the issue with grading is that as long as you can achieve the highest grade, nothing further than that will ever matter. For example, here are the grade boundaries for GCSE Biology (AQA):
Given that the second-highest grade, an 8 (requiring 118/200 in this instance), corresponds to an A* in old GCSEs, with 59%, you don't need to know anything more. So, I have no reason to try to immerse myself in the subject/put considerable effort in because it's not necessary to really know very much to score highly. I was very not knowledgeable on particular units, such as homeostasis and organization, but even still, it doesn't matter. If you score 66% on this test, you are scoring effectively the same as someone who scored full marks. This is, naturally, rather demotivating... and that's the whole issue.