<p>I’ve never seen anyone take a “redo exam” or even heard of one at a “lesser ranked college”. At least not in my part of California. </p>
<p>At the community college level (at least at mine) if you plagiarized you did not just get a slap on your wrist. Even cheating a few students in my french class were expelled after one instance. </p>
<p>My chemistry community college assignments were taken from some honors curriculum at some other school. It was not easy. All of my physics teachers were graduates of UCLA (Phd’s) and taught the classes as if we were students from there. It was not easy. One even had his own book and honestly needs to get out of that community college because he is still doing research in physics and publishing papers. I know they recently had the Discovery channel come by. Now, a ton of my other non-technical classes felt like high school all over again with zero need to study. </p>
<p>When I hear other people saying that they did a bunch of matrices for Linear Algebra, my jaw drops. My whole community college class on Linear Algebra was 90% proofs. I transferred to a no-name college in the rankings (Cal Poly), but I don’t honestly believe that it’s going to be easy getting through everything here. It may be harder elsewhere but is by no means easy with easy grades with trivial assignments. Not all lesser ranked colleges are easy. Some of them, sure (Cal state LA). But no hand-sweeping generalization can be made. I believe it’s the professors that make the rigour, not the type of school you’re at. It’s not necessarily easy to get by a State university such as mine when we get worked like dogs from people who previously taught math at Harvey Mudd or went to MIT/Caltech as undergraduates or graduate students.</p>