@LivinProof Our S is a Regents at another UC and he said basically the same thing this quarter, that everyone else was getting it except him. So she’s not alone in being hard on herself.
I posted this in another thread several months ago, but the same course can vary greatly in difficulty from one year to the next at the same school. For example, a freshman engineering CAD course used to do some relatively simple designs, turn in the Solidworks files, at that was it. Last year it was changed to design a more complex object (a robot), plus they had to create the parts from the design, assemble it, and program an Arduino. Much more work for the same class and number of units. Both versions of the class satisfied ABET accreditation.
So it’s no stretch of the imagination that a school where students are more capable can have more challenging “equivalent” classes than a school where the students need to learn at a different pace.