<p>There’s a high baseline for ABET but it’s easy to compare the rigor of various intro courses. Look up MIT’s Intro Chem course (the non advanced one) and compare it with that of UCI’s. They’re not the same. MIT expects that students will have a rigorous grounding in physics and thus exposes the freshmen to the whys and hows of chemical bonding, radiation, etc. UCI only glosses over those details because professors cannot make the assumption that students will understand wave interference, vectors, etc. So sure they cover the same thing, but one covers it far more comprehensively than the other. </p>
<p>Of course engineering is a bit more narrow than most fields in terms of differing expectations. There are some schools which simply demand much more of their students than others. For instance, the thought of taking a factual recall test in history at my previous school would have been seen as ludicrous. Yet at my much less selective one, that’s the norm for intro history courses. Of course they have a few papers sprinkled in, but they seem to demand far less critical thinking and synthesis than those at my previous school. </p>
<p>I just don’t see how anyone can argue that Stanford undergrads are graded to the same standard as those at San Jose State. If they were, the average Stanford GPA would probably approach a 4.0 rather than whatever it stands at now.</p>
<p>Professors tend to teach to the median. If that median is high, their expectations will probably be much higher than if they taught at a less selective one.</p>