I needed a 400 level math class and hadn’t taken any more than I had to for algebra. I had already maxed out calculus at the undergrad level - I LOVED differential equations. Some where in my second year calculus made sense, this after I squeaked through Calculus I and II, so III and IV then rocked and I took differential equations for fun.
Anyways NEVER take a class that has the word topics in the title!!! What I learned in school.
Geometry, yeah right, it was set theory set in n-dimensional space. How is it geometry in n-dimensional space??!! I slid into the last spot and passed because my average was like 39.6% which the prof rounded up to 40% so I could pass.
Until I took this course I loved geometry, even the theorems, but after it, nightmares.
Oh, but as for a class that had the worst professor, World Literature, easy. Which was a tragedy as I love literature and was really looking forward to that class. Our teacher was this senile 300-year-old grandmotherly type who would go off into wild tangents that involved Coca Cola and Jesus, and which had nothing to do with the Iliad.
She also had this habit of coming up, peering at us through foggy eyes, and saying, “Now, children, did you do the work on page 397 like I told you to?”
We’d exchange looks of confusion, then some brave soul would pipe up, “But Ms. B----, you told us to do page 395.”
“Now children,” she’d say, “I know I told you to do page 395.” She could not be swayed. Every single student had done page 397, just like she told us, but she apparently changed her mind between classes and never bothered to tell us. So many times I wanted to jump up, ram page 397 down her throat, and scream, “This is what you told us to do, you hoary old bat!”
Heh, reading this thread feels a little like looking at my vita. I’m a physicist, so most of the E&M, Quantum, and Calc/Diff Eq classes mentioned are familiar to me. Somehow though, I always got physics – those classes always came to me pretty easily.
That being said, the hardest class I ever took as an undergraduate was a 200 level Philosophy class named Idea of Beauty in Ancient Greece. I took it because I liked greek art and culture, and thought it sounded cool. However, one of the first things I learned in the class was that I wasn’t very good at philosophy. I probably put more work and time into that class than any of the 400 level physics classes i’ve taken since. On the bright side, I also feel like i got more out of that class, or to be more specific grew as a person more due to that class than any other i’ve ever taken. It’s a good thing to wander outside your comfort zone from time to time. Even if it does mean staring at lots of nude men
As a graduate student, the hardest class was Fourier Optics, not so much due to the material as the fact that the professor was quite possibly the worst we ever had (this was a class consensus too, not just my opinion). Powerpoint is not the preferred medium for lengthy derivations, IMO.
Undergrad: Accounting 201 - I had absolutely no desire to understand corporate accounting and could never get my balance sheets to balance.
Law School: Civil Procedure and/or Evidence - Both classes had concepts and topics that were extremely difficult for me to grasp without having put them in some sort of context or practice first.
Every accountant I have talked to about college courses has shuddered at the mention of this class (I’ve only talked to Florida and Texas students, so it may vary with other states). Rumors persist that the sole purpose of this class was to weed out the weak from the profession, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true. The school I graduated from was considered one of the top schools in accounting, and this single class was MUCH worse than Income Tax. It came in second in difficulty and brutal post-trauma flashbacks only to the CPA exam.
Anything that involvs a lot of memorizing has always been bad for me. I have a generally good memory but my random association skills are a bit skewy. So classes like Anatomy where it was pretty much memorize every body part, or Latin courses, where you just have to learn mountains of vocabulary, I don’t do the best at.
Strangely enough, as a CS major, I can remember inane programming functions and terminology very well. Not sure why my brain decided to specialize its memory for CS, but there ya go. I usually end up relating every other memorization skill back to CS concepts if I want to pass.
Hardest class…intersting question. The only class I have ever failed was differential equations…noticing a trend here? Although I mus admit, it wasn’t so much hard as it was I never went to class. The prof. was this old, befuddled, lady who would go through this long procedure of solving a problem, get to the end, notice she made a mistake, not know where she made it, and told us to go figure it out ourselves…? EXCUSE ME? YOU are paid to teach US, you are not paid for us to teach ourselves, otherwise there would be no lecture, just a textbook and a room to take exams in!
Although, *Introduction to the Finite Element Method was a major bitch. My average was actually well below 50%, but the prof. was so bad, and everyone in the class did so bad, that after the curve was factored in, I ended up getting a C. It’s a sad day when a 40% is a C. I know of no one who has enjoyed that class. It took things I learned in Strength of Materials, and made them make no sense by introducing meshes and a crapload of HUGE matrices. It’s a mech e. course, yet it’s offered as a restricted elective, you take it or another course, mose take the other. However, I am a biomedical engineer with a concentration in mechaics, so it was required for me. I know I will never use what I learned in that class in any capacity other than using the software I learned, the only think I liked, actually. COSMOSworks software is da’ shit, man!
This is a bit of a tough call. If it were a matter of lousy marks being an indicator, then I’d say it was Molecular Biology. That subject jerked me around like you wouldn’t believe. Thing is, I was 16 when I signed up, 17 when I took the class… and I didn’t really have a clue what I wanted to be doing, or what I was really interested in. So as I said, tough call.
In terms of out and out difficulty, I would say the hardest was Advanced Japanese. The class was in two units and we had to pick up about 50 new kanji a week. Worse still, there were people in the class who’d been to Japan and had studied the language for sometimes as many as four or five years more than me! The level of competition drove me mad! Things turned out nicely in the end, I’m relieved to say, but it was a stressful experience.
Oh, and while the subject itself was pissweak, I had to read a stack of Kant for this class on logic and reasoning. Kant is a bugger and a half (or at least, the translation I happened to end up with was).
My chem tears came from a stupefying frustration and a small fire I started in the lab. Gah!
Undergrad (apart from chemistry): ANOVA and Regression, both taught by the same guy. Very difficult for me, but I learned so much (and guess what I get to teach this semester?). Hardest exams were in Group Psych Testing.
Graduate: French, for one of my language requirements. My “Je n’ai give a shit pas” attitude didn’t help (probably stemmed from a complete inability to converse in french). Physiology courses were difficult for me (going for a biology Ph.D from a psych masters) when I got to the point of realizing how little I knew about the subject. But I found the material fascinating so the extra work wasn’t that bad.
I’m another vote for Diff Eq. Organic Chem at my school is one of, if not the hardest, classes offered. It’s the big pre-med weed out class. The crazy thing is that they only accept Orgo credit from our department or Harvard, so pretty much nobody comes in with credit for it. I’m sure glad I’m not pre-med.
As an undergraduate, Biology 110 wins hands, feet, and flagella down. Apparently there was an unspoken rule that, as humanities students, you were either supposed to take Introduction to Geology (a.k.a. “rocks for jocks”) or Geography to fulfill your science requirement, and Biology 110 was only for those who had decided that concepts like “fun” or “sleep” were not an integral part of the university experience. Despite desecrating several pig carcasses and skipping the lobster dissection “out of respect for the deceased’s family” I somehow managed to eke out a 76 in the class.
In grad school, my “Representations of the Body in 17th and 18th Century British Literature” class was bloody difficult. It was an interdisciplinary class put on by the History and English departments, but all of us were lit students, which drove both us and the professor from the history department batty. None of us really knew what was expected of us until halfway through the second semester. (However, the field trips to the anatomy lab and the units on early pornography and disease were very cool.)
Not because the subject was hard, but because I had it scheduled as the third one-hour class after two other one-hour classes right before it. By the time I dragged myself into EE101, I was too exhausted to take notes, much less comprehend the material.
And this is why I limit myself to software matters.
A few of us Honors-department geeks were discussing a similar question once: what is the hardest major? Our ranking of the top 3 was (1) physics, (2) chemistry, (3) computer sci. The fact that these were our majors did not prejudice the judging at all.
That said, the hardest individual course I ever took was probably Honors World Geography my freshman year, one of only 2 courses in my college career where I ended up with a C.
And then there was the speech course that I had to take twice. But that doesn’t really count; it wasn’t because the material was difficult, but because I have a horrible phobia of public speaking and had to drop the course the first time through because it gave me panic attacks.
For me it was Data structures and algorythmic methods. Not because of the subject matter, It’s actually what I’m most interested in. But because of the format.
It was a designed weeder class to see who the professors wanted to care about in the computer sciece department. Lots of people took the class with no others at the same time, and many other were on their second or third try. The programs they had us do were pretty much impossible to get functional with the features required in the time period. The tests very beyond impossible too, (I got one of the highest grades on the midterm, 21%). Basically everybody finshished the class around 12-35% of the total, and the prof arbitratrily set the grade scale at how she wanted the grades to shape out.
Undergraduate: History of England, no question. Not because of the subject matter (it wasn’t particularly difficult), but because the teacher was so incredibly bad. It met one night a week from 7-9:40 pm. The teacher had a terrible speech impediment (the nervous “ah…ah…ah…” between every other word) and the class moved excrutiatingly slow. There were only about 10 people in the class and I once fell asleep and fell out of my desk. Not good.
Graduate school: I have a difficult time adding 2 +2 and getting 4 as the result, so I was deathly afraid of Statistical Applications, but the teacher was so good, and the class so full of real life applications of the concepts, that I got an A in both semesters. The most difficult was probably my Individual Studio. I had originally decided to do an urban design analysis of a neighborhood here in the city, but realized about 3 weeks into the semester that I didn’t have the graphic skills needed to demonstrate my ideas. I sort of shifted the focus mid-semester and had to work my ass off to pull it all together (I never even bothered to meet with one of the professors assigned to critique my work). Additionally, I was working full time at a demanding job.
I am a science major in my 3rd semester of college. I went back to school when was 24, so this whole thing has been mildly difficult. But, without a doubt, the most difficult class I have taken is * Introduction to Drawing I*.
The class was 4 hours a day, 4 days a week. And then I would spend at least another 4 hours everyday ouside of class working on the assignments. This was on top of working 30 hours a week.
I got an ‘A’ in the class but I worked my ass off for it. I have a much greater respect for professional artists and art majors. The class was fantastic and I am never taking another art class again.
Well, it was a very long time ago, but this civil engineering major found that the toughest course I took was Old Testament. It was the second to last quarter in school, and I was frankly looking for a class to take in one of the older buildings on campus just for the that experience in and of itself. The time fit into my schedule, so I thought “why not?” That was one hard course! Learning all those kings of Judah and Israel, all the wars and prophesies, what a pain. I struggled to get a 2.0 in the course. Give me calculus and physics any time.
