@Hanna, with our kids, large public, not magnet in flyover land, they were less prepared for the STEM type classes in their private T20 colleges, especially the hard sciences like physics and chem vs classmates from the more rigorous East and West Coast schools. With my D who is a PhD candidate in Chem, one of her strengths has been writing and communication skills both in her first job at a research institute and for her grad program. I agree, too many STEMy types don’t have good communication skills which makes them less effective.
@MWolf while I agree that some of the grading discrepancy is a result of self selection and institutional pressure to make their students look good for jobs and grad school, what we also need to see is the grade distribution by major over time that we see in post #4 to see if certain majors inflated at a higher rate than others. Also I separate rigor of courses vs grade inflation as 2 separate issues. A history course can be brutally hard in terms of readings, papers and tests, but the professor could still give out 80% A’s and a “Rocks for Jocks” course that does not require a lot of work might only give out 60% A’s. That has to do with the grading philosophy of the department/professor. Is grading absolute such that A is for excellent work and theoretically 100% of the class can earn an A or is grading meant to be relative with strict curve cutoffs. Certainly for my kids, the courses that were more quant driven (clear right or wrong answers) tended to have more defined grading curves than more qualitative courses where the answer/conclusion was less important than how the student reached their conclusion.