I hesitate to believe that students anywhere who have mastery of hard problems are getting Cs. Some highly selective schools may be giving these kids Bs. Gtech has a reputation for tough grading, but as a very large tech state school it also accepts probably 25% people who would not get into engineering at other schools. My experience at a flagship is that you do not want to get into engineering unless you can do the work, it is very painful and leads to being tossed out with a low GPA (unless you are smart enough to see writing on the wall and leave after one semester of Cs and Ds). Getting As at MIT might be a challenge and may be unlikely if you aren’t in the top 50% of the class in high school prep and well, intelligence, and of course work ethic and study skills.
The accelerated math classes and exposure to Calc1 and possibly 2 and AP physics, chem should help insure there are more qualified engineering students. One way this may not appear to be true is that many opt out of repeating these classes, so don’t get the easy A they could, leaving lesser prepared students to get lower grades.
Similarly, if I needed help writing a good essay, going to Williams might just make me a C student in English.
I doubt anyone really cares about grade distributions, they just want As. And having taught classes, that is really just too bad, since I make the curves and give the grades and I am not giving someone who does not have high mastery an A or good mastery a B. I may have extra credit so people who want to lift themselves a few percent can, but then again that just makes more work for all the solid A/B students. Seriously, I could have assigned final grades week 3 when I taught, it was plain to see … then it’s just a matter of taking the class through the required material with the mastery expected for each student. A few people go up or down … work harder, lose interest, get confused … but not many.
Does anyone who actually has taught a class have a really different experience? Students don’t seem to be very self-aware in their abilities or how well they are keeping up with the material, it’s more about what they need from the class for med school or graduation or for reimbursement.
I think the one true way for professors is that you want those who deserve it to get the As and you want the class to master the material, often by using the carrot/stick that is their grade.
Between colleges, I guess you want your college to be easy grading but known for rigor so you can get honors from SchoolX, put it on your resume and get that consulting jobs with 6 figures + bonus.