I'm paying upwards of $20,000 a year to be "average"

Isn't "C" supposed to be the average grade? Shouldn't people be content (or at least not be distraught) with getting C grades? So then why am I made to feel so shitty about "average" grades? 

This is the grade distribution for the midterm I took at the beginning of this week, my grade lies exactly at the average, and so does the grade of about 100 of my peers to the left and right of the average, with about 100 more being just slightly off of the average, higher or lower.

So 200 of the 500 students (40% which is consistent with a normal distribution) who are in this class got around the same grade on the midterm, and that's apparently about the level of understanding that students who study a moderate amount can reasonably be expected to get to, at least for this test.

So why are Cs seen as such a bad thing? If they're what everybody else is getting, why do I feel like shooting myself in the face for not getting a 90 instead of a 73?  Because letter grading sucks, that's why.

I hate the way the school system works, I (and my intelligence) should not be judged on an arbitrary letter grading system that employers can look at to see how good I was at memorizing what clade the genus volvox falls into and what it looks like (they're actually pretty cool, and they're "green algae" in the plantae kingdom if you were wondering). Actually, I just looked up what wikipedia says about the subject, and apparently ecologists can't even agree where they go in some photogenetic trees. Why am I being tested on things that we can't even agree on? But anyway...

What irks me the most is that I'm getting decent grades in the classes that I care about and that are going to be relevant for me in the future when I hit the job market, but I'm just not doing well enough in the bullshit introduction ecology courses that have information that's relatively useless to me. When I start working in a lab I'm not going to need to know what type of fern was the precursor to the modern day plant, it just won't be relevant. Sure it might be good to have a general understanding of this stuff, but the teachers are testing us on the minutia and it's pointless.

I put an alarm on my phone yesterday to remind me every day at 10AM that I'm paying $20,000 to be labeled as average to the general populace and future employers. Hopefully that will be a good motivator to bite the bullet and study this useless information. (Sorry ecology fanatics, I hate your science.)

ANGST.