One thing where this analogy stops to work, is that more so than in school your performance in a company can be highly dependent on how well and/or timely others do their job. Your managers performance metric may or may not catch that. E.g. imagine you are assigned a project where you have to interact a lot with department X and now department X is running at/over capacity, so you are performing worse, because their part isn't done in time and each back and forth takes half a week. Now you spend half your time not being productive with no fault of your own and the others are 110% productive while setting the whole shop on fire. Based on that metric they should fire you and hire more people for department X, when in fact they should probably just hire more for them (or reorganize the department).

Another example where this analogy stops working is that in school the students usually get the same/comparable assignments, that is somewhat the point of those. As the goto hard-problem-person at my current workplace I am pretty sure that it is absolutely impossible to compare my work to the work of my collegue who just deals with the bread and butter problems, it isn't even the same sport. How would you even start doing a productivity comparison here, especially if you understand 0 about the problem space

Great perspective and I agree. This is the basic reason that performance management in an organization is so difficult and fraught.

A significant percentage of people in an organization create the problems they solve.