IME, a "weeder" course (public universities, CS department) has: * Large lecture sizes, often with professors who cannot teach or don't care to * Little stude

IME, a "weeder" course (public universities, CS department) has: * Large lecture sizes, often with professors who cannot teach or don't care to * Little student-professor engagement * Large discussion sections with TA's who can't teach either * Usually focused on calculation over rigor or depth. Usually no proofs, actual reasoning behind things hand-waved away, focus is on memorization. * Large homework loads * Large test loads or particularly high-stakes exams * De facto pass requirements drastically different from the actual grading scheme used in the course (eg: requiring an 80-90% grade to stay in the major in a course where the professor expects the average exam grade to be 40-50%). This often leads to curving the grades arbitrarily to get the cohort size the department actually wants.