I absolutely hated my academics apart from the patches that involved doing projects and interesting 'real world' work.
My experience with academic education was something like this. It was always a blind race for scoring marks/grades. At the end of every day what comes are series of boring assignments and homework whose use no one knows of. Not doing the boring stuff gets punished. Exams are always about getting a seat in a nice institution. And the cumulative effect of that is to get a good interview call. People with higher grades and marks ultimately get placed in better places to repeat the same kind of boring stuff in big corporates.
Well I am from India. The best experience in my college days Ironically came from working at a Government Military organization called as GTRE(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Turbine_Research_Establishm...). I learned more in the 6 month apprenticeship than what I learned in years. We also did great work, I can't disclose the work as its defense stuff and I'm under NDA. Next best experience came during working for a start up during my semester holidays.
Every time I went back to college I felt pathetic.
Post college, I saw the so called toppers were all about two things. Do their MBA from a B-School and then join a Bank or some business role, Or work for a nice start package at a large corporate. The silliest thing I saw was even the job scenes were filled with interview procedures designed to hire top rote learners. Knowing algorithms by heart, memorizing arcane facts, learning puzzles from a particular book, stuff like that. Practially 0 importance for things like hardwork, productivity and getting things done.
Second bizarre things I noticed was large corporates required completing pointless certifications for hikes and promotions. This was college all over again for me.