At the Imperial Academy, credits were of utmost importance. You needed credits to graduate, to take make-up classes, to advance in Combat Technique—even if you wanted to go into politics, you still needed credits. If you didn't attend your teachers' extracurricular tutoring sessions, how else could you get to know those promising upperclassmen and upperclasswomen?
But credits were extremely scarce. For the vast majority of students, grinding through classes was the only way to earn them. In a certain sense, grinding equaled trading your time for credits. While classes were meaningful, many students had already set their life goals early on, and much of the course content wasn't actually the skills they needed—yet for the sake of credits, they had to take the classes anyway.
