What was the most useless class you took in college?

In My Humble Opinion
101

Women’s Fucking Studies. I had to take that shit TWICE. Me! Chirpy blonde I-worked-for-Dean-and-Marched-for-Women’s-Lives-and-came-from-a-single-mom-hippie-postsmoking-household! I signed up because I needed one stupid credit in humanities (my history & polisci classes didn’t count) and there were no seminars or anything to make up for one freaking credit.

Stupid.

Stupid.

I’m not kidding. I had like a C-- by the 10th week, so I got the papers signed for a W (because I was about to get a D) and re-took it the next semester. :rolleyes: I think I ended up with a D in the end anyway and said fuck it. It was my lowest undergrad grade but in my senior year, it didn’t tug that much at my GPA. (Figuring if I somehow couldn’t pass Women’s Studies 101 BUT I could pass Legal Research & Writing, War and Peace, and take my Senior Seminar with a 4.0 my senior semester, my transcript would live.)

It had nothing to do with my ability to grasp the information - it had to do with me hating the fucking ‘curricula’. Since I didn’t agree with 90 per cent of their positions, I was always knocked. It was all discussion and review based, so pretty subjective.

Women’s studies: Love your vagina and boobies, discard makeup, love handles are beautiful, burn your bra (f that!), hate the television, hate men, despise religion, and revere lesbians.

I am serious. I was so shocked. I thought Limbaugh was making that shit up.

(my women in politics class was** so** much cooler. i had three books on economics and women and globalization. i got an A.)

102

:dubious:

This could explain some things.

103

I took Marriage & Family my freshman year. I liked it. I learned a ton about statistics and marriage trends. It was part sociology, part psychology.

I thought it was cool.

It was not a ‘this is how you make a marriage work’ class.

104

Physics 4D - hands down. Let me explain. I was a Civil Engineering major and according to the course outline I had to take three quarters of Physics 4 (physics for science-y majors) and I also had to take Thermodynamics.

I had an opportunity to go to Summer Session one year when Thermo was available, but Physics 4 wasn’t, so I took it. Unfortunatley, Physics 4B includes a section on thermodynamics and the Physics Department will not give you credit for 4B if you’ve already taken Thermo. The Engineering Department, on the other hand, has no trouble giving you credit for Thermo even though you’ve already taken Physics 4B.

There’s nothing in the course catalog warning anyone that taking them in the wrong order will screw you over. You find it out by getting a little note when you sign up for Physics 4B saying that BTW, you won’t get any credit for this. Transfer students are more likely to get caught by this, because their classes are a bit out of the regular alignment.

So since I couldn’t get credit for B, and I still needed 3 quarters of physics, I had to take Physics 4 ACD instead of 4ABC. Physics 4D is relativity and quantum mechanics, and not the interesting kind that’s fun to read about. It was a huge slog for a bad grade using equations that I knew I’d never use again. I joked that I’d be willing to sign a statement swearing that I’d never build a bridge that went faster than light or was smaller than an atom if they’d just release me from the requirement to take that class.

I’m sure it built character, but if it didn’t, then I got nothing out of that class.

Well, maybe indirectly. Since the Thermo class was in summer, it went faster. Two two-hour classes per week for five weeks, I think. The professer spent the whole first class on vocabulary. That was 10% of the class time. I thought it was odd, and found myself checking it against other classes.

The 10% held up. Most classes defined vocabulary as is came up in the course of explaining processes or techniques, rather than front-loading it for the whole course, as he had done. But explaining the special vocabulary for the course always seemed to take up about 10%. It was an interesting thing to have found out.

105

Sociology. Communistic BS.

106

Two math courses: Real Analysis II and Chaotic Dynamics. I took them both the same semester, and both were taught by the same professor, the quirky Dr. Michał Misiurewicz, whom I had had the prior semester in Real Analysis I. I dropped another course the day the semester began to grab a spot in the Chaotic Dynamics course that opened up unexpectedly.

In the first four weeks of classes, two weeks were cancelled because of snow storms. Then, in weeks five and six, classes were taught by random grad students after Dr. Misiurewicz suddenly fell ill. After week six, it was apparent that he was severely ill, and the math department scrambled to find permanent replacements while grad students continued teaching. Of course, those grad students each had specific areas in which he or she was specializing, which wasn’t real analysis or chaotic dynamical systems, so for the first half of the semester was spent doing homework and reading in unrelated fields, then turning it in to some different grad student who had no clue what the homework was about, so it went ungraded and unread.

Finally, the school tapped two capable men-- the former department chair and dean of the school of science for the Real Analysis II course, and a tenured prof who also ran the math olympiad team for CD-- and the classes began anew six weeks before the end of the semester, where they faced the impossible task of (a) trying to pick up where Dr. Misiurewicz had left off content-wise, (b) fitting 14 weeks’ worth of stuff into six weeks, (c) how to fairly grade everyone when no one had any grade record-- no homework scores/graded, no quizzes, exams, midterms, (d) how to meet the needs of the class since no grade record meant that the abilities and deficiencies of the class were unknown.

Real Analysis II ended up pretty much rehashing I (most of the students had struggled in I, but Dr. Misiurewicz apparently had given them gentlemens’ Cs, which encouraged them to stick with him to get the course sequence done without much work… the new prof. graded harshly, though), and there was no time to do more than a cursory intro to the basics of chaotic dynamics in the CD course, so the final grade was based on very simple material… material that had been covered in Real Analysis I, but that needed to be introduced to everyone else in the class since I was the only one who had done that course! :smack:

Got out of the semester with my GPA intact and closer to my math degree, and I didn’t learn a thing.

107

Ancient Greek. I remember almost none of it now, I did not use it in any other part of my degree; unsurprisingly, nor have I since graduating. I doubt it really developed my general language/memory skills as I scored highly by cramming at the last minute rather than working hard throughout.

It wasn’t even useful for bumping up my average as it was a first-year class, and my first year did not count towards my final degree score.