[21723]

Disagree. Business schools have upgraded the "Gentleman's C" to an A-minus, due to grade inflation. (I wouldn't use the word "gentleman", though; most of the people today have no culture.) Even at Ivy League colleges, while you can challenge yourself and learn a whole lot--there's nothing wrong with the programs, and the professors are often top-notch--you don't have to do so, because there are plenty of rich kids with no real talent or work ethic but who need a good enough GPA to get into investment banking.

[spacemanmatt]

I'll agree to split that hair here: B-school professors probably don't get to call their own shots, and as such, do not act in their role as educators in those cases.

[21723]

It's not just B-school; the predictive variable is the social class of the students.

In low-income public schools, the problems are systemic and have more to do with society than the quality of teachers (which is not as poor as the right wants people to believe). The teachers are mostly fine; the total environment is broken, as the students live in a society that has already (through no fault of theirs) given up on them. So, there, the school ends up functioning as daycare, but there's pressure due to crowding to pass kids even when they didn't really learn anything. It's administration that pushes teachers to lower standards.

In the middle-income public schools, the problem of relaxed standards probably exists the least. You don't have entitled parents (until college, it's the parents who cause these sorts of problems--the kids find it embarrassing) suing over a B-minus in biology and what it will do to little Timmy's future, but--unlike in a low-income area--you don't have the problem of kids being unable to concetrate on homework because of living in a world that is actively at war with them.

In the prep schools, and also the Ivy League colleges, there are a lot of sue-happy students and parents, and even though these lawsuits have an infinitesimal chance of actually winning, administrators would rather just change a grade, and of course the parents know that most people prefer the path of least resistance. Over time, this leads to people doing it preemptively, and the standard declines. This obviously isn't what educators want, and it's often not happening consciously.

For an example, every Ivy League college has, informally, two economics tracks. There's the "real econ" track in which the students study actual economics--and usually have to take real analysis--and then there's pre-banker econ where the courses barely require any work and grades below a B+ are simply not given. If you want to challenge yourself, you can, and you're going to have to do some serious work if you want to come out in the top 10% at an Ivy... but you don't have to.