hanako wrote: If there are particular cases you are stuck on, those cases may be too hard or not clued well enough, and letting you cheat your way past them will not solve that problem for others.
So if you're having trouble, please, please post about the problems you're running into and what's going wrong!
I guess my biggest concern with difficulty is how much your first couple of weeks in the game can dramatically change how difficult the entire rest of the game becomes.
Depending on which cases you get randomly thrown, you can either get much needed training points, or get stuck with a time sink of a case that gives you 1 or 2 points for an entire week of work. I think cases like
Cell Phone Madness,
High Rollers,
Missing School Supplies, or the drug cases should not be possible in the first couple of weeks. Getting handed one of these cases right off the bat basically handicaps you for the rest of that game. Where as if you get
Missing Item,
But is it Art?, or
Struggling Student, you can easily rack up training points quickly.
You might also have the random case assignment take into consideration cases that the player is already working on. I know in the later stages of the game, after you've expelled the traitor, and one of the council members like the sisters have flaked out on you, getting multiple cases that include a lot of students can quickly snowball into an easy Game Over. Getting
Cell Phone Madness and a drug case simultaneously when you only have 3 reliable council members is a nightmare when those cases keep spitting up new students to question like Russian nesting dolls.
Cell Phone Madness is particularly difficult for me, and I have an abysmal solve rate on it. I didn't realize until I read your thoughts on the case on the boards here what I was doing wrong - it wasn't at all clear in the game. I would think I had the outbreak contained, because I would see the photo on the phones, Detain and break the girl in the photo, and convince everyone else through Harrassing to delete it from their phones, or tell me they had already deleted it. Then, SURPRISE, a school scandal erupts.

I didn't realize I might need to Detain one of the other girls too. It might be a more realistic way to solve the case, but if we are talking realism,
Cell Phone Madness would be an impossible case to contain anyway. The Internet is forever.
I also have had problems occasionally with the Gambling Ring cases - for instance, one case appeared and told me gambling might be occurring in a classroom. I search it, get a Success and find nothing. So I Stake Out the classroom every single day with Rowan (who had absurdly high Observation and Stealth scores) with a Success each time. But nothing happened, no new leads, no other options, and after a week I get a scandal about gambling in the school! I was really confused about what I could have done to solve the case. It just seemed like a cheap shot that was impossible to avoid.