@cobrat : There are still some professors like that at my school. I remember going to pick up my Arab-Israeli Conflict (hosted by history department) final paper/exam (which was weighted most of the grade) and fortunately I did well enough to get an A- but I was surprised the amount of C (even some C-) grades I saw. However, this was rare in history. There are maybe like 2-3 other instructors I know back there who gave students C grades. However, it is political science and psychology that still have a surprising stronghold of instructors who do so. Interesting, in political science, it is many of the those hosting survey courses (one difference about being at a private schools is that even the large survey may still be small enough to have a discussion section and significant writing requirements. I’ve looked at great public schools like say Georgia Tech and they have the standard large lecture: “here take the multiple choice exam” paradigm because the section was so large) and these series of upper division professors who teach “law” related courses (like on the courts and civil liberties). Psychology at my school had a more neurobiology/science/clinical lean so many of those courses are much more challenging than elsewhere (many elite schools also typically place a heavier emphasis on reading primary literature and data analysis in psychology courses than straight up textbook learning).
In addition, @Cannuck hinted at, both of these departments have methods courses (with psychology having the worst reputation perhaps because it wasn’t just a statistics course but actually had them carry out the surveys and studies they were interested in) that had a bad reputation. I wonder if the reputation was warranted because now there is a new statistical inference introductory course being required by many of the social science departments there and many of the social science students struggle through that (admittedly it is a stats class with a lab section that requires students to learn R and is less based on plug and chug and more on experimental design issues and understanding data. The plug and chug stats class in the math department was eliminated as a result so students can no longer run to that joke).
*Nonetheless, today, I think, even among Ivy leagues that graded harder in the 90s, the types of courses and grades y’all mention seem much rarer in social sciences outside of economics. This can even be said for the better southern schools which in the 1990s had much lower grades than today (more than .1 lower). I wish the rise could be explained by higher scores, but again, I do not think we are talking about classes that pre-dominantly use just exams (specifically multiple choice) to assess. In STEM, many professors see the same performance today for the same or lower level, so any increases to mean grades there is just flat out grade inflation. Amazing that some professors will still go out of their way to say: “no they are just smarter!”. Perhaps their own class is so easy that an increase in already high SATs would directly correlate with grades in the course which, a scenario which raises more questions than answers.