Some people like to feel superior to other people... those kinds will always gravitate to places with artificial latter's or levels were they can be at some place higher than the bottom. That includes teaching.

Really great professors are exactly the other way around.

They try to elevate their students not putting them down. Once you identify a jerk professor just stay away. There are too many good ones.

Keep in mind that many departments have so-called "weed out" classes designed to test your persistence and fortitude. Engineering is (in)famous for that as is pre-med - as both are disciplines featuring challenging working environments. They need a way to test whether you can "hack it" at the job or whether your slot should be made available for somebody else who can.

We can discuss whether this is the most effective way to make such an evaluation, but oftentimes this is what's being done.

Way back before Noah's flood I didn't think so (UK). However, it is apparently rampant in Italy in Law degrees. Further more they require students to buy their slightly updated textbooks every year ($$$).

At the university level you have tenured professors, who don’t need to secure a good academic job, and adjuncts, who do. I suppose some professors suffer from insecurity and make their classes difficult on purpose, but at the risk of failing too many students and losing enrollments, which will reflect poorly on the teacher.

Perhaps the students don’t want the challenge and hard work. I noticed that in my time at university. I wondered why some of the students bothered to pay for college since they put little effort into the work.

In 1964 Vladimir Nabokov, a former professor at Cornell, made his famous comment about the “The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily scribbling on.” Nabokov certainly did not need to polish his reputation.

I gave up teaching—that’s about all in the way of change. Mind you, I loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved composing and delivering my lectures on Russian writers and European great books. But around 60, and especially in winter, one begins to find hard the physical process of teaching, the getting up at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle with the snow in the driveway, the march through long corridors to the classroom, the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map of James Joyce’s Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping car of the St. Petersburg-Moscow express in the early 1870s—without an understanding of which neither Ulysses nor Anna Karenina, respectively, makes sense.

For some reason my most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith. Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30. About 150 students—unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of pages. Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me, seeing in me with hope and hate the source of forbidden knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: “Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that…? Or do you want us to answer only the first part of the question?” The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily scribbling on. A rustic arising simultaneously, the majority turning a page in their bluebooks, good teamwork. The shaking of a cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time’s up.

Imagine the privilege of taking a literature course from Nabokov then fussing over the grading curve. Sadly I doubt many students in Ivy league schools today would even recognize Nabokov’s name.