Grades and Learning

Are Grades like operant conditioning? I think that they kinda are. Students are conditioned to think thats A's make you a smarter person, and that F's make you a stupid person. This is not even true. Getting an A does not make you smarter or even better then any one. You could just be memerizing facts, and not even learning any thing. I would rather get a C, and learn at lest one good fact that i didn't know, compared to getting an A and not learn anything new. But Students are conditioned to believe an A is better then learning new things.