@Creekland : I think what I am sort of implying is that most courses that students at elite schools or elsewhere find easy are typically memorization focused because that is something most of us were overly exposed to, especially in life sciences (and even other sciences) curriculum in grade school. Usually courses that lean more on reasoning and analytical problem solving cause even the highest SAT/ACT scorers trouble because it isn’t enough to simply know the content or knowing every problem type you’ve been exposed to while studying. Usually such instructors get the “tests us on stuff we didn’t learn” reputation. To me this is code for: “This instructor surprises students and makes them think about what they learned in a seemingly unfamiliar context or maybe even requires some creativity”. Most students, including high achievers seem really comfy with neat and predictable and as an educator, you probably know what that may entail in a college classroom or any classroom.
I’ve met many students (I am among them) who are comfortable with courses that involve more conceptual logic and reasoning, but it seems like the vast majority prefer what I described earlier and that makes sense because it is how many of us were trained prior to college (heavily coached and spoonfed material and told exactly what was on a test and how it would be tested). There is a reason so many students find organic chemistry, for example, an oddball. Forget it if you integrate lots of reasoning into biology courses. Unless they are a majority of the bio curric.,at a school, said courses will be avoided like the plague because that isn’t how most people’s biology courses went in high school (they were often just content overload). I guess I just paint “challenging” as whatever forces most students out of their comfort zone or upsets previous ways of obtaining knowledge/studying. For most it would be STEM courses with less memorization or with instructors who throw critical thinking oriented “curveballs” as many call it. It’s why I always relate the two (difficulty and style of assessment and course delivery). My opinion is that every STEM major should graduate knowing how to use the knowledge or at least understand reasoning in the field, and yes most will enter college with different readiness levels to make that adjustment. You’ll notice that at selective schools, the courses that mostly assess basic understanding and remembering/identifying have 85+ course averages. One has to go to higher levels of Bloom to get 70 and 60 averages.