I found this snippet from an open letter he wrote to the Mathematics Department in the past:<p>&gt; you instructed me to show a draft of my final to another very eminent member of faculty and former winner of
the distinguished teaching award. His comment on a draft that contained 8 questions was that it was already too long
and too hard, and should be no longer. I had originally been planning on asking 15 or so questions, including some
difficult ones, but I was not allowed to do so. In the end we settled on 12 questions. The result of this intervention by
you and other faculty was that the median score was over 90%, and in order to keep to departmental grade
distributions I had to set the A- cutoff at 93%<p>The implication here seems to be that his final exam was notably harder than is typical and yet he was forced to throttle the cutoff for an A- to enforce regulated grade distributions (which in and of itself is a horrendous policy).<p>The letter is here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alexandercoward.com&#x2F;OpenLetter.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alexandercoward.com&#x2F;OpenLetter.pdf</a><p>I think it&#x27;s hard to ignore this in combination with the highest teaching scores anyone in the department has received in apparently 18 years.