Academic educational quality is uneven, especially if you are not in an honors program. The student quality varies a lot (partly due to the 10{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} law). A student who scored 1500 on the SAT might very well be sitting next to one who scored 1000. Most of the basic classes are jokes, especially the non-science/math ones. I've found my liberal arts requirements (English, Sociology, Philosophy, Government) to be absolute jokes. The TA's graded extremely leniently on written exams (when they were offered) and sometimes the tests were all multiple choice or even true/false. I made 98+ averages in these classes with minimal studying. Bad papers I wrote 20 minutes before the start of class garnered sparkling grades. You can make an A without learning or retaining any knowledge whatsoever. I tutor and edit papers and found many students struggled in these (to me) seemingly blow off classes. Some students could not write at a high school level, much less a collegiate one.
The Business School is the hardest school to get into, but many outside of the B-school also consider it the easiest school to get grades in/graduate from. While many of my fellow McCombs students would vehemently deny this, I find it to be, outside of Accounting, true. On Accounting, the program at UT is ranked #1. 90{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} of the graduates go on to work at a big 4 firm. Accounting is demanding and one of the gems at UT. But most of the classes offered at McCombs, such as Management, International Business, Marketing, and MIS are not difficult, and require a minimal amount of studying. The fact is, there really isn't anything substantial that you can learn from a BUSINESS class, leading towards the light workload in most McCombs classes. However, McCombs in the last year or so has been promoting and implementing the "group project" as a key part of the learning experience. Classes in the past that used to be all independent work, now all require a group project. This teaches students how to work successfully in teams, which is a great skill in itself. No other school's require th amount of collaborative work that McCombs students engage in. Grade inflation does seem to be a problem in many classes, going to class everyday and doing the required work will earn you at least a B. One of my instructors curved to department standards, or so she claimed, which meant 40{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} A's, 40{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} B's, 20{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} C's, which I felt to be excessively high in an already easy class. No one fails anything(besides accounting). Another instructor gave completion grades on essays. My MIS class had no homework, because it was all done in class, by following the instructors lead (aka copying her code). It's hard to learn when the instructors don't teach much and many students simply don't care about learning. Many are grade whores and choose classes based on grade distributions or try to cop-out of basic requirements by taking classes online or at ACC. They want A's, not knowledge. Intellectual curiosity is absent.
The instructors are a mixed bag. There are a lot of foreign professors and even more foreign TA's, especially in the quantitative fields, and many of them commit the three sins of teaching. First, they have no personality. Second, they speak soft heavily accented English. Third, most of them hate teaching undergraduates. All of this leads to dismal educational experiences. I once had a class with a Japanese Professor and an Iranian TA. Suffice to say, neither of them made much sense, so I did most of the learning myself. So if you are an engineering major that's bad at calculus, don't expect the prof's or the TA's to be of much help. On the other hand, I've had some enlightening and truly wonderful professors in some of my classes. Many of UT instructors, especially in the lower level classes and at the business school, are lecturers or adjuncts, so you might not actually be taking class with a "professor"!
Advising at UT is unhelpful. All advisors do is look at your classes and make sure you are on pace to graduate. They aren't much help for anything else. You have to be a self-starter, no one will be there to hold your hand.