@Sophie1295 and @collegebobollege : Vanderbilt is no different than any other top public or privates in its tier. The other majors being easier is a product of historical grade inflation and instructors (whether full-fledged faculty members, grad TA’s, or post-docs) falling in line and choosing to grade easier because they want to keep enrollments up in those departments and classes (and when you look at humanities, they have fallen at most schools…note that even at places like H, people know that even when you take into account any increases in student body quality, that professors in such depts simply grade less stringently than they used to…the culture has changed in such depts since the 70s or 80s). Vanderbilts average graduating and per semester GPA’s have traditionally been in line with and still are in line with the schools I’ve mentioned (in fact, a couple may be a little lower). We all like to believe our schools are exceptional with things like this so that we can say it is harder in some way, but often that just isn’t reality.
This “grade deflation” that y’all speak of happens in STEM (and often in business and economics) at all of the schools I mentioned. They ensure that means in most courses do not exceed certain means by making exams hard and curving up to an arbitrary number, designing the exams and assignments so that the total course average goes to that number and it is common business school practice (among those that have B-schools for UGs in that list) to put grades on distributions, which yes, means many professors will curve DOWNWARD if the distribution of As,Bs, and Cs doesn’t fall in recommended brackets. The latter case is actual grade deflation and the former case is just the departments making themselves internally challenging meaning it is simply being adjusted in difficulty to give the smart students a run for the money. It isn’t truly deflation.
It isn’t like classes at “easier” schools yield higher averages. They are about the same or lower, but with easier content because the student body isn’t at the same level on average (and often isn’t the same traditional college student population). Selective school STEM depts typically challenge students as if students are good and are mostly traditional, so it is just hard from an objective level (as in, if you put your test side by side with that at a much less prestigious school, you may indeed see a HUGE difference)…that is all. Vanderbilt is no exception for STEM and is pretty stereotypical. Many other similar level schools have chem and/or biology courses that are much more killer for example as they grade similar but give much harder exams or work (the same could be said for the other STEM depts…but it is mainly those two where you see lots of variation. Likely has to do with dramatically different teaching and testing cultures in them at a per school level).