When I was in college there were professors who were hard but fair, hard and not fair, and just easy.
Profs who were hard but fair never had a problem filling up their classrooms with students who self selected for wanting to learn.
The hard but not fair ones were just assholes IMHO.
The easy ones also had their classes filled up.
My community college had two history profs, one had all essay questions, one had multiple choice. The essay question prof was considered "hard", but so long as your essay justified your position and was well reasoned, you got full credit for the answer.
I hated the multiple choice prof. He gave the entire class his test bank every quarter and you just had to memory hundreds of questions and he'd pick 50 for the test. IMHO it took more time studying because I had to read the book and then memorize a bunch of pointless answers, vs reading the book and understanding what was going on, which I can typically do in the first pass.
Throughout my time in college and university, I did have two teachers I would describe as "hard and not fair".
The first was a second-year Physics teacher at my community college. He said that at least 50% of the class should fail. Not 50% will fail, but that 50% should fail, and if less than 50% fails, the class was too easy. He demanded that we memorize 30+ equations that could appear on the final and did not allow a notecard of equations.
The other was my Algorithms teacher in my third year, who basically wasn't teaching what we really needed to know, as far as I was concerned. I was expecting to learn breadth/depth-first searching, binary search, sorting algorithms, maybe even path-finding like A* and Dijkstra's, etc. Instead, the entire course was about algebra dealing with Big-O, Big-Theta, and Big-Omega, with only a slight nod to how they related to code.
Profs who were hard but fair never had a problem filling up their classrooms with students who self selected for wanting to learn.
The hard but not fair ones were just assholes IMHO.
The easy ones also had their classes filled up.
My community college had two history profs, one had all essay questions, one had multiple choice. The essay question prof was considered "hard", but so long as your essay justified your position and was well reasoned, you got full credit for the answer.
I hated the multiple choice prof. He gave the entire class his test bank every quarter and you just had to memory hundreds of questions and he'd pick 50 for the test. IMHO it took more time studying because I had to read the book and then memorize a bunch of pointless answers, vs reading the book and understanding what was going on, which I can typically do in the first pass.