[cetahfh14615]

As a recent grad, this doesn't at all seem surprising

I had a class where literally half of the people in it cheated on the autograded assignments and got caught. Then after getting caught a bunch of them cheated again by just refactoring what they already wrote

There were two to three other classes where a group of 10-20 people banded together and started insisting out of nowhere that the class was "too difficult". We had one lecture where the professor was reviewing the exam material and this group literally wasted the entire lecture bitching about the class and yelling at the professor over zoom

I've found that you only hear about it being a "hard" class if a bunch of people get together and start insisting that it's hard. Which then puts pressure on the professor and uni to water down the class, which then makes it worse off for everyone else and dilutes the program

Sorry for the rant but this stuff still pisses me off to this day

edit: I feel like video lectures (and class group chats without uni oversight) enable this behavior. This and the sheer complacency on the part of universities for prioritizing "student well being" over actually teaching something

[chernevik]

When I was in college, in the 80s, some professors and courses had campus-wide reputations for difficulty. Of one the student course review said "if you take Professor X you'll learn more from your B- than you will from any other class you take".

It turned out that these were generally the most interesting and rewarding courses, and these professors the ones most concerned about their students learning. They were pretty well attended. Everyone knew from Day One what they were in for, and everyone did the work. Those that didn't want to do that work found other courses.

[euroderf]

Absolutely. And one of those classes was O-CHEM.