But I’m curious about why you say your home course has too low of a course rating and slope. The same team rated your course that also rated others around it, using the same worksheets and formulas, and your course is rerated at least every 10 years, and likely more often than that. The only reason I can think of that players say that about a course is that it’s just another way of saying the same thing; that they have trouble playing to their handicap in away rounds.
Which is, again, a misunderstanding of the system. For any given round, home OR away, you only have a 20% chance of playing to your index anyway, and the odds of that become much lower depending on how unfamiliar the away course is.
At my home course, I know EXACTLY where to aim my tee shots, where NOT to hit driver, which pins NOT to attack, and so on. That doesn’t make me more likely to play to my index; that’s still 20%. BUT it likely does mean that my AVERAGE score is going to be in a tighter range, as well as a bit lower than in my away rounds. That doesn’t mean my course is rated incorrectly; it’s just the nature of knowing a course, or not.
I hesitate to respond to this at length because it (1) involves knowledge of the University of Maryland golf course and (2) brings up a whole new discussion of how you calculate course and slope ratings, which I also don't know a ton about and which I'm sure has been discussed on here before.
Having said that, my understanding is that the course has a relatively low course and slope rating (~7,000 yards, par 71 from the tips; CR=72.2, SR=124) because it doesn't have a lot of hazards--there are few water hazards, no OB, and generally few opportunities to lose a ball.
But there's a lot more that plays into course difficulty than this. And two things that make Maryland hard are that (1) there are a lot of awkward trees ~150 yards off the tee and narrow corridors that make driving intimidating and (2) the greens are well-bunkered and often benched into the side of hills, which makes for some very difficult pitches if you miss them.
Maybe others don't get intimidated as easily, but I feel that the intimidation factor of trees encroaching near the tee and narrow driving corridors are among the main things that make a course difficult. There are a lot of higher sloped courses with a good amount of water or forest lining the fairways (Maryland mostly has open stands of trees lining fairways) that just don't feel nearly as difficult off the tee to me because the clearings off the tee are ample and the landing areas look wider. Even if there are higher potential scores for a miss, it's easier not to miss in the first place because I'm more comfortable. I don't know if course and slope ratings capture this intimidation factor and maybe it'd be hard to do because not everyone responds the same way, but it's a big factor for me.
I'm sure that the course and slope rating system accounts for bunkering around greens. But I wonder how well it accounts for the severity of green sites. Maryland has a few greens benched into the sides of hills where there aren't too many places to miss where you're guaranteed better than a double bogey and a few where that's probably the best you'll do. No water around the greens, but I'd almost rather land in a pond where I can drop nearby than come 30 yards back down a slope and either duff one and have it roll back to my feet or send it 30 feet past the pin and 3 putt. The course has a handful of the most exacting approach shots that I've seen, even though there are almost no lost ball opportunities near any of the greens.
So I tend to score well on other courses relative to my home course--the opposite of usual. And I conclude from that that University of Maryland has too low of a course and slope rating, perhaps because the system doesn't account well for some of what I've discussed above.