First off, I found your reaction to the show both amusing and, in a lot of ways, quite on-target -- the show deserved kudos, especially in the pre-Norman Lear era, for taking on race relations, pollution, "women's lib," drug use, and the generation gap . . . but its approach was, sadly, often a little naive and occasionally preachy.
Anyway, to answer your question -- no, Harvey Butcher was not portrayed as a genius who would get exactly 70% on all his exams; I have now watched all the episodes of the first two seasons, and he was in two of them (one in each season) -- in Season 1, in the episode "Funny Boy," Butcher (portrayed by Elliott Street, who then went by the name William Elliott) was a "class clown" who acted out and made a lot of jokes, but Pete Dixon learns that it's because he sees himself as the fat kid who's the target of a lot of abuse and uses humor as a defense.
In Season 2, in the episode "The Laughing Majority," Butcher injects himself into a rather dull school election (once again using humor) which somewhat ironically creates a huge groundswell of interest in the election. Then Harvey realizes that, much to his surprise, his effort to ridicule the election just might get him elected.
So far as appears on IMDb, those are the only two episodes to feature the Harvey Butcher character, at least as played by Street.
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