Grades, are they still important?

Being someone who grew up around people who take grades very seriously, I was taught from an early age that grades are important.

Good grades open many more doors and they affect your life directly out of high school whether you're going into college or not.

I believe that grades not only show intelligence, but effort. You can be terrible at math, but with enough studying you can get a decent grade. Being in high school, I'm around mindsets of all sorts. Some students care so much to the point where they need to get perfect grades. Some only care as much to make sure that their grades are...