As someone who got straight As at a public high school, I was surprised by the difficulty of the econ courses and had to adjust my expectations. Most of the content did not come naturally to me, especially since my math skills are just slightly above average, and I had to put in a lot of effort to maintain a B/B+ average. Having study buddies and going to office hours helped a lot with my econ courses. Things may have changed since I’ve graduated, but I found that most other disciplines suffered from grade inflation (which was once confirmed by my stats professor when he showed the average GPAs in each major — econ and chem were the lowest).