The drive to learn and to be knowledgeable leads students to study hard and achieve high marks in exams. In turn, it leads man to explore and to discover. This has to be the greatest advantage of drive theory. It is, in many ways, what has led to our evolution.
If we were not driven by a desire to move from an unfulfilled to a fulfilled state, at the most primal level, we would perhaps not seek food and shelter. Furthermore, we might not ever look to improve our state of living or environment. Human advancement and our very survival could be attributed to drive theory.
Drive theory simply fails to explain why humans do things which put them into a stressed or unfulfilled state. A few hundred years ago, humans went exploring the world across vast oceans even though there was a significant chance of never returning. On a smaller scale, some people love to ride roller coasters or go skydiving. Surely this goes against a basic drive for security and tranquility.
Some sports psychologists have argued against drive theory. They say that while being "psyched up" can certainly help an athlete perform, there is a point where the anxiety becomes too much and actually prevents them from performing. This has led to a new theory being developed. The inverted-U hypothesis states that an athlete's performance is improved with increasing levels of stress. However, at a certain point this peaks. After the peak point, more stress actually produces worse performance.