It really depends where you go. Personally I had a miserable experience many of the reasons were due to the university I attended. Instead of hiring qualified professors, they hired qualified engineers. The university made a substantial amount of money off of any research the professors produced into a product. So they offered free research and got a large percent of the profits. Unfortunately one equation I did learn was a great engineer does not always equal a great teacher. They were often condescending held little or no office hours. Handed all their work to their T.A's(who often didn't speak English well enough), and did seem to choose awfully written books that (most often) they or their colleagues wrote. The books were terrible because they were laid out poorly and did not have complete information. The book would skip steps in the process of simplifying equations, and (only in one case) did the book actually have no information that the questions, in the same book, required. That I remember clearly. As for inflated average, I would have settled for a "typical" average. My class averages were often in the low double digits and sometimes single digits. This includes honor students. It seemed more for separating the weak from the strong, than actually transferring the information. I made it because I was just to stubborn to quit. Plus the grades all had to be put on a curve so despite my grade average of a 24 i ended up with an 86, but never thinking you can actually pass a test on your own is a mind f*ck. We were told by a T.A. once that they were trying to fail out students for the first year of engineering. Turns out they were actually trying to fail us out for the first four years.
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It really depends where you go. Personally I had a miserable experience many of the reasons were due to the university I attended. Instead of hiring qualified professors, they hired qualified engineers. The university made a substantial amount of money off of any research the professors produced into a product. So they offered free research and got a large percent of the profits. Unfortunately one equation I did learn was a great engineer does not always equal a great teacher. They were often condescending held little or no office hours. Handed all their work to their T.A's(who often didn't speak English well enough), and did seem to choose awfully written books that (most often) they or their colleagues wrote. The books were terrible because they were laid out poorly and did not have complete information. The book would skip steps in the process of simplifying equations, and (only in one case) did the book actually have no information that the questions, in the same book, required. That I remember clearly. As for inflated average, I would have settled for a "typical" average. My class averages were often in the low double digits and sometimes single digits. This includes honor students. It seemed more for separating the weak from the strong, than actually transferring the information. I made it because I was just to stubborn to quit. Plus the grades all had to be put on a curve so despite my grade average of a 24 i ended up with an 86, but never thinking you can actually pass a test on your own is a mind f*ck. We were told by a T.A. once that they were trying to fail out students for the first year of engineering. Turns out they were actually trying to fail us out for the first four years.