Sample cover letter for Internship position at facebook

Sorry if this will sound blunt and it's probably not strictly true, but I think it is true enough for me to say it: Because no one in the real world cares about grades. Even in academia, your past grades matter much less than references and research. Outside of academia, it matters very little altogether. For example, in my ten year career in finance and technology, I probably spoke to several dozen companies. Not once did grades come up (including at companies where I was not a good fit). Facebook is a particularly forward leaning company, so of course they won't be considering that. 

Now before I upset the academics here, let me say that the broad point isn't that you should slack off in school and not learn. The point is that you should maximize for learning, not grades, and most likely grades will follow anyway, but learning is what will matter mostly in the short run and entirely in the long run.

I think in the past, grades were used as a proxy for learning explicitly by companies. Increasingly, companies can evaluate the precise skill sets they need for particular roles on their own, not relying on university grades, and coarser signals such as how good the school itself is are more useful than particular grades.

Note: this answer is clearly US-centric. A few people mentioned to me that in many other countries, grades are still viewed as important by companies. So I guess if that applies to you, and moving to the US is not an option, you may need to optimize for something that you know is not the right objective.