I did the minimum required to not fail out of high school. In the massive amounts of time that I freed up by not doing homework, I taught myself to program C and Java and Perl. I made sure I understood the material I was not doing the homework for, so I could ace all the standardized tests. I took (and aced) the AP tests even though my school didn't offer AP courses. I (barely) graduated high school, then worked for a year at a tech startup. Evidently some admissions officer found that impressive, so I got into a top college.

Then I did the minimum required to not fail out of college. (Actually, I cut it really close, flunking two courses in my major and at one point having it look like there was no conceivable way I could fulfill the graduation requirements.) In the massive amounts of time that I freed up by not doing homework, I redid the database system for a 100k-user website, wrote the school's course evaluation system, and taught myself Lisp and Haskell. I had no trouble finding jobs after college, despite my dubious graduation status.

Remember that no matter what you're "supposed" to be doing, you always have a choice in what you actually do. There're lots more paths to an impressive resume than doing well in school.