[ohfunkyeah]

I'd argue that most employers don't really care. They want to use degree, university, and sometimes grades as a first-round filter for screening applicants. Do they actually care if you took the challenging Philosophy course from the good professor, or the easy-A from the Roman History professor? Hell no. So if the primary thing you want is a job, why would you ever take the challenging class? If a professor is significantly and knowingly more challenging than their peers and they don't adequately convey that up front why shouldn't they deserve a bad review. Part of the job is conveying expectations, and in my experience it seems like plenty of professors who will challenge and push know they are like this beforehand but really don't do anything they convey this until after a student is committed.

[nostrebored]

I think that you're right that employers don't care about the specific courses that you took. I think you're wrong to assume that that doesn't mean that those who do take the more challenging courses do get ahead. The best networking I've done was in my challenging courses, where I met smart people who were also interested in learning and bettering themselves. My admittedly skewed and anecdotal evidence is that those people I knew who challenged themselves are now working at better jobs or going to better grad schools than those who decided to coast by.

I did not have a single situation where I did not know the difficulty of a course going in. While professors may not adequately let you know, any one of your friends or a number of websites make this information easy to obtain.

I feel like I might be alone in this, but I feel like if anything, a professor should warn you if they know that they do not challenge and push. You're in a university course -- it should be challenging. Courses should not be designed for an average student to excel.