# Red or Blue > Why aim for top marks and an honours diploma when there may be no reward? So that I do not let down the ten-year-old version of myself from Class 5A. - Canonical page: https://shorin.me/en/blog/2024/06/kursovaya-rabota/ - Page language: English - Published: 2024-06-24 - Tags: Career, RANEPA, LifeLongLearning, Management - Russian version: https://shorin.me/blog/2024/06/kursovaya-rabota/index.md Red or blue? On Saturday, I defended my term paper with an excellent grade. That officially completed the fourth of my five semesters at RANEPA. I would like to share a screenshot from my student account showing that, after four semesters, my average grade is 5.0. But you may have heard that RANEPA’s information systems suffered a cyberattack at the end of April. Since then, many things have not worked, including the average-grade display. In this post, I would like to reflect on gold medals and honours diplomas. The value of a gold medal at school is perfectly clear to me: it gives you advantages when applying to university. As you may remember, I [do not have one](https://shorin.me/en/blog/2024/05/min-max/index.md), because a gold medal at AESC MSU is almost unimaginable. There were several requirements for an honours diploma at Moscow State University: - No grades below a B on the diploma; - An average grade above 4.75 (mine was 4.81); - Excellent grades in both the state examination and the diploma thesis. I put in the effort and earned my honours diploma. What did it give me? Perhaps an advantage when applying for postgraduate study. In postgraduate study, I passed every examination with an excellent grade. At my PhD defence, all 33 ballots out of 33 were in favour. Unanimously! What did that affect? Absolutely nothing! A PhD diploma has no distinctions within a given field: no colour, no anything else. Back to RANEPA: we live in a new normal, so modern students face plagiarism requirements in addition to the traditional ones. To qualify for an excellent grade: - Originality must exceed 65%; - Matches and citations must each be below 10%. I made a little extra effort and met those requirements (see the screenshot). Why? What will it give me in the future? Just in case? Is this what high-achiever syndrome is? I have only one answer to all these questions. I need it for myself, so that I can look without shame into the eyes of that ten-year-old boy from Class 5A who, more than 30 years ago, proudly watched everyone passing by from the honour board at Secondary School No. 4. ## Media ## Original posts - LinkedIn: