There’s a lot I loathe about Blackboard, but I will say that I can see stats for every multiple choice or true/false test item I post, so I have a very good sense of which questions were tougher and whether any were either tougher than I was aiming for or poorly worded. I can also see what the mean test score is at any time, so I can evaluate whether the people who take it at the very last minute skew the mean grade (answer: yes, often by 10%).
No, you’re not. My own department required a course called “Media Writing” that is designed to prepare students for the next set of major courses, all of which are writing intensive. Students must pass the course and a comprehensive written exam to be able to move on. Getting below a C for the course and/or failing the exam outright means the student has to re-take the course; not meeting the requirement a second time means the student may not continue in the major. The same is true for minors.
This sort of thing, whether it’s policy or tradition, is useful to weed out people who don’t belong there. IME, it’s the second course in the sequence so as to avoid punishing people who need the intro course as a gen ed or to meet some other requirement.
Robin
I do the same using the stats sheet after scoring the scantron sheets for the multiple choice section of my exams. If more than half the class misses a question I go back and review it. Often enough I look at it and say- well, that separates out the As- fair question!
If I do say so myself, I write an excellent plausible-sounding nonsense answer. What really astounds me is when students then argue that “It could have been ‘Rudner’s Folly’” when I have made up both Rudner and his folly, and the correct answer is something like “gravity.”
Well that’s an interesting question. Basically years later I knew some one who at one point taught in that department. Anyway she moved to teaching at another college and she mentioned how at the old school she basically gave out A’s and B’S and at the new place alot more C’s. So it peaked my interest about the old place that was there some sort of expectation that students there generally don’t flunk. Of course it’s not totally the same since she teaches an east asian language. (I figure the vast majority of her students actually want to take that course so that probably selects students more likely to do better vs. students getting tortured while they try to satisfy a language requirement.) Anyway so I was kind of curious if that sort of thing could reflect badly on the person running the class. (Not a professor btw, a grad student.)
I had an undergrad Engineering course (Electromagnetic Fields) that would have had a 30%+ failure rate, if those students had been dumb enough to stay in it. Instead those people dropped it and took it the next semester.
Hell, I think most of us that went to college experienced that. (It seems lots of majors have the famous weeder courses fairly early on.) Then again I never understood how freshman bio or chem were weeder courses. (Since I actually did well in those courses without much trouble. 
Actually that’s not fair since I did take them when I went back to school years later and not when I was a wet behind the ears undergrad who didn’t even think to check for dread requirements.)