With respect to the fiction courses, however, the intermediate ones were mostly taught by younger professors whose ideas about what constitutes good writing were fairly specific in terms of style and subject matter, whereas (and perhaps you'd expect it to be the other way around) the advanced courses were taught by older professors whose ideas concerning good writing were pretty encompassing -- they understood that not everyone needs to write like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolfe.

Plus, far fewer students applied to the advanced courses (most would've preferred to have taken the intermediate courses first and not too many got to do that), so that probably had something to do with it as well.