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The grades you got in school don’t really matter, says educator and bestselling author Esther Wojcicki.

Speaking recently at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Wojcicki said education in the U.S. — and other countries with similar systems — is flawed because it discourages “kids who are super creative but who are not following all of the rules.”

“How do we continue to encourage them?” she asked. “The number one way I think we need to [encourage creative students] is we need to cut the importance of grades.”

Wojcicki, 81, taught at Palo Alto High School in California for more than three decades. She’s also the mother of a doctor and two CEOs: Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, and Susan Wojcicki, who announced on Thursday that she’s stepping down as CEO of YouTube after more than 20 years at Google.

Wojcicki’s decades of teaching high school taught her that good grades are overrated, and not a significant indicator of a child’s future success. Yet they’re an important factor in how the country’s education system views students’ success and determines their future opportunities, she said in Dubai.

“Everybody is fighting for grades and those grades lead to college, and if you don’t have those grades you cannot go,” Wojcicki said.

Valuing grades above all else encourages students to “memorize” facts to perform well on tests, sometimes leaving behind intelligent and creative students who who don’t excel at memorization, she added.