Obama must have had very average grades in high school, since he only ended up at the moderately competitive Occidental College. With affirmative action, even an average set of grades would have gotten him into a more competitive undergraduate institution. This is no surprise since he admits to cutting class and doing drugs for most of his time in high school. It's also hard to gauge his academic turnaround since no one at Columbia University seems to have known him and both Obama and Columbia refuse to release his transcripts, compared with say, George Bush, whose undergraduate transcript you can see here. http://www.americanpolitics.com/bushtranscript.html.