<p>Top STEM schools hire profs for their research and the $$ their research bring to the school, not their teaching ability… (BT, seen it waaayyyyy too many times to count.)</p>
<p>(And even LACs which are for their supposedly superior teaching can have profs who have ‘retired in place’ and are teaching when they really shouldn’t be. Or new profs who come with terrific recs, but are duds in the classroom.)</p>
<p>And an ‘easier’ school really might not be. D1’s state school could be considered ‘easier’ than D2’s research U, but the relative difficulty of getting an A was about the same. D1’s Ochem gave out more As, but there were a whole lot more kids in the class too. (500 students and ~40 As. vs 200 students and ~30 As.)</p>
<p>And profs see lots of students over the many years of their careers and are being asked to evaluate students not just relative to their peers in the that particular class, but also relative to every student they’ve ever taught.</p>