* Unless they happen to be scholarship students. Scholarship students traditionally have to work harder than everyone else because they can't afford to buy homework or tests, or to pay people to take tests for them. One potential mark against them is the possibility of grade inflation endemic to the institution, but this maybe more or less variable in a particular STEM discipline.

Also, state research universities didn't/don't have as much grade inflation because they're intent on "competing" in the ranks without having the legacy, endowment, or name branding that Ivy's and Pac-NN's, so typically all they have (outside of NCAA sports $$$). University academic department staff are worried about bolstering their public image and of winning the approval of accreditation organizations.

Frame of reference: Most all of my college-prep public high school friends went to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or CalTech while fewer, like me, went to University of California universities (UCs) like Berkeley or UC{LA,SD,SB,D}. I'm only certain of a few certain universities of that era were more or less more rigorous by comparing notes on specific courses and how team participation was regulated fairly or not. In 2001, we had a intro networking course requiring creating a forked caching HTTP/0.9-1.0 network web proxy server as one project of many.