One problem with university courses today is that the students evaluate the instructors. Now, that sounds harmless, right? Even beneficial. The students evaluate the instructors, the university reviews the results, and they can weed out the bad instructors and help the good ones improve, right?
That's the theory. The reality is...a very large percentage of the students expect the instructors to:
(a) make the class really easy, and
(b) make the tests easy, and
(c) give out 60% A's and B's.
If the instructor does not do this, then the students "punish" them on the evaluations. I have personally seen evaluations, on a scale of 1 to 10 for each question, be 100% 1's (the lowest value) for some instructors.
For such instructors, instead of a bell curve in the evaluations, you see a capital M formation, caused by a number of students who like being challenged and who felt they learned something evaluating the instructor highly, and another number who are "punishing" the instructor because the class was too "hard".
General result - such instructors are not retained. Instead, instructors who "give away" good grades, get good evaluations. They are retained.
Yes, that is exactly what I have seen and experience every semester.
I'm one of those that is overly critical of "easy" professors and I always give the real teachers excellent reviews.
I even went so far as to personally thank my Calc 2 teacher for not dumbing down the class when I took his class my first semester in college.
It does seem though that the majority claim the real teachers are "bad teachers" because they can't scoot by, skip class, and still get an A when they don't know jack.
I noticed this when I personally handled the evaluations for one of my classes. The teacher was excellent by my standards, a select few seemed to agree, but the majority gave some pretty harsh reviews.
Here, it never seems to be your own fault when you do bad.