Nonlinear optics by a mile. On the first day of the class the professor advised the room full of Ph.D. and Masters candidates that they should not bother to take notes as they would not be able to keep up. He would provide his lecture notes instead. The second class had only half the students as many dropped.
He was right; it was impossible to take notes as he went too fast. His notes, which filled a 4 inch binder by the end of the semester, were comprehensive but dense. Four inches of tensors, vector calculus, complex wave equations, pertabation theory, and momentum space diagrams in cramped double sided sheets that almost required a magnifying glass.
It was the best class I ever took and I can safely say I would not be the scientist I am today if I had not taken it. It rocked.
Another physical chemistry here. I did better with the first semester, which was basically thermo and kinetics, than I did with the second (all quantum). I also don’t really have the mind for inorganic, despite taking two years of it, which is why I’m an organic guy.
I always wanted one of those “Honk if you passed P Chem” bumper stickers but never got one.
Introduction to Electromagnetic Fields. My university worked on the nine point system then, and we called this one “nine the hard way” because getting a 2, then a 3, then finally a passing 4 wasn’t uncommon. Maxwell’s Equations are for knowing, not using!
Vector Calculus was bosso! I kicked its ass! I aced that class, and loved every minute of it!
But the next class up, where we had to do Greene’s Theorem, and closed-loop integrals had to be transformed into nested orthogonal integrals… Woe! I squeaked through with a measly C. Awful experience.
I also had trouble with Advanced Statistics. Just barely clawed my way through. Miserable.
I too struggled with pchem. We didn’t have the traditional thermo/quantum split. For whatever reason, we covered both the first semester, then were bludgeoned by advanced topics in each during the second semester. And I had trouble with the second semester.
I think it was a combination of still not being the best student and having some other challenging classes that semester. And the topic was a stretch for me. But I’ve gone back and used material from that class and been ok with it.
Intensive Greek was the most work. 8 hours a day for 6 weeks. But it was a joy.
But the toughest to survive was surely 19th Century British Autobiography seminar. Five people, including the professor. The toughness was entirely the professor’s demeanor. Horrible class.
Money and Banking II. This class was offered to both grad students and undergrad. I took it as an undergrad and the only difference was a paper was required for grad students. I think I studied more for this class than I did for all classes my first semester.
I was a biochem major but needed English credits. The course was an upper level physics course that I used for English credits. I got an A, but worked my ass off for it.
Research Methods. Going to 14 schools before high school left me with an excellent liberal arts background and almost no math skills, I had never taken algebra. Fast forward 16 years as I go back to college in my 30’s and walk into a classroom with a big E on the board. My classmates were amused I didn’t know sigma notation, and they were horrified when they realized I didn’t know order of operations. They tutored me enough to pull a B, I tutored them in writing papers. It was a mutual win.
As an undergraduate, my toughest class was probably Differential Geometry (in terms of the class I understood the least). Although a special note has to go to the Linear Algebra 1 class I took where I got a 48% on the midterm exam – that was the first class I ever took where the professor expected us to be able to replicate the proofs of theorems on the exam rather than just applying them. I ended up with a 98% however, after he allowed us to drop our one lowest test grade in our final mark; the mid-term was a wake-up call, so I did a lot of memorizing proofs for the final.
In grad school, the classes I understood the least were probably Lie Algebras (the professor was truly awful) and Topology (I literally don’t remember a single thing about this class).
Algebraic geometry in grad school. As an undergraduate my only Cs were the two terms of anthropology, which is really odd since I thoroughly enjoyed the courses and still have and occasionally look at the texbooks. Somehow the prof and I were on different pages, since the exams didn’t appear hard either, but of course were graded subjectively.
Algebraic geometry is just a beastly hard subject and I never really understood what the Riemann-Roch theorem was about, although I kind of do now.
The Economics of Money and Banking. The prof was cool, but he might as well have been chanting in Swahili for all I could understand. If he hadn’t graded on a massive curve, I’d still be taking that class 40 years later.
Computer Architecture. The material wasn’t hard, and I actually liked the class. What made it hard was it was a course where people would skip so much that the professor cancelled class a lot and it was hard to stay motivated. I think four or five times I went to that class, and only three people showed up so he said something like “Where is everybody, did they all drop out? You guys can go home” Also, we were in Boston and he usually cancelled class if the Red Sox or Bruins were playing.
General Physics II. I thought Newtonian physics (General Physics I) was kindof fun. But General Physics II was about electricity, magnetism, optics, etc. and I had no fucking idea what I was doing. I think I got a C. Math and physics never came easy to me.