What's the Toughest College Course You Passed?

Probably my numerical methods class. The programming wasn’t that bad, because the algorithms were in the book, but, oy, the exams. Not a confidence building moment when you realize that forty five minutes has gone by and you still haven’t set pencil to paper because none of the problems look remotely approachable.

Weirdly, the TA was, for some reason, impressed by the work I did in the class and the professor later recommended me for a job at a company in which he was a co-founder. Apparently my epic levels of befuddlement were not externally obvious. Might have been easier if I hadn’t foolishly taken 6 classes that particular hellish semester.

Organic Chemistry 2, Electric Boogaloo. By a half percent, if memory serves. I have no idea how I even made it that far.

I pulled a C- in Calc 2. I was #^¢*ing proud of that C too, considering the teacher was a more-than-half-batshit scatterbrain who, more often than not, would forget what she was doing part-way through an equation and ask us what the next part of the step should be. Or she would do steps 1–3, and take a step into crazyland derivations that would have everyone looking like :confused: and then she’d take another look at the board and go, “Oh, right, that’s from like graduate level math that you haven’t had yet. Okay, forget that and let’s do this next set of equations.”

Everyone was basically self-taught for that class because the prof was undeniably brilliant, but totally useless as a teacher.

Calculus itself made so much sense because I finally saw a use for all the basic bullshit they’d been teaching in algebra and geometry. Honestly, if they’d started with some really basic calculus concepts integrated into earlier math — or at least just hinted at what you could do with it — I would have been much more interested in math because calc concepts made it actually useful for solving interesting problems.

(A little late and off topic, but I’m curious)
How does a philosophy paper differ from any other liberal arts paper?
I took a couple intro-level philosophy courses (40 years ago!), and nobody every told me the structure was different.

As far as I can remember, I just wrote like any other paper ( whether the class was history or philosopy, or whatever) with the same structure: an intro to say what I was going to say, the body of the paper to prove my point, and another couple paragraphs at the end to summarize it all. Typically about 8 pages on my manual typewriter.

Advanced Programming 2; or, The Internship With A Lecture Section

The point of the course was to make or substantially enhance a nontrivial program for a real client who would, in theory, actually use the finished result. Therefore, of the three legs of the software creation stool (Quality, Features, and Release Date), Quality and Release Date were prioritized. Very reasonable, in theory.

In practice, it combined the worst elements of a class and a job:

Like a class, you had no fixed hours, because working on the software was homework. Endless amounts of homework, because there was always something you could be doing. You could be testing. You could be researching the underlying technology. You could be fixing bugs. You could be adding features. You could be writing documentation. Therefore, if you were doing anything else, you were doing that thing instead of working on the program. You weren’t working on your homework for another class, you were working on your homework for another class instead of working on the program. You weren’t relaxing, you were relaxing instead of working on the program. You weren’t sleeping, you were sleeping instead of working on the program. It really solidified my desire to take a job with fixed hours, let me tell you.

Like a job, there was no easy ramp-up to learn the requisite knowledge. Most of the team I was with (all classmates, of course) had relatively little knowledge of the language and framework required to meaningfully contribute. We had to learn quite a bit very quickly, knowing that others had to do more due to our ignorance. Yes, it was intellectually challenging, but that’s not what made it hard. What made it hard was knowing that our work wasn’t helping the rest of the team. The vast skill mismatch made it difficult to apportion tasks, as did the fact the teams in general had been chosen more to evenly divide the class than to ensure each project would have the right number of people working on it.

In the end, around the last couple weeks of the semester, the client decided not to use what we’d developed anyway, and instead went with a much simpler version one member of the team wrote entirely by himself over a weekend. I didn’t even care at that point, really. I even kept working on the useless codebase, simply to show good faith and to hone my skills in the technical aspects.

I got an A for the course, which was the only grade given in the entire course. I’m very glad I took the class, and I don’t regret one bit of it.

Oh yeah, I also took Calculus II from a man who’s no longer allowed to teach calculus at that university despite the fact his wife is the head of the calculus group there. I got a D, which meant I took it again and got a C the second time. I don’t have any interesting stories about that, though.

Toughest course was either advanced engineering mathematics, which had prerequisites of five semesters of calculus and differential equations, or vibration analysis which had the same prerequisites.

Worst class for testing however was heat transfer. I had a professor who was pretty good at teaching, but for some reason was a bastard on exams. He picked the textbook, which only had property tables in English units. It was the only resource allowed during exams, which were all in SI units. Even with a programmable calculator (OK, two resources) 20% of the exam time was just unit conversion.

I took a class in which the material claimed gay rights were a Russian plot to destabilize America’s moral center and the government discovered effective ESP-based intelligence collection methods. One of the references we had to read was a book written by an AIDS denialist that claimed the EU was an anti-American alliance created by former Nazis.

I honestly couldn’t tell if the teacher genuinely believed it, or if he was somehow trying to provoke us into thinking critically. You know, like if he was going to give an A to the first student who stood up and called bullshit. I made a point of prefacing every response with an explanation of why his sources were not credible and their arguments illogical.

The class itself was not particularly hard. I call it my “hardest” class because I had to make it through the day without screaming at the top of my lungs. The class was so bad that I would have dropped out of the school entirely, except that it was the last class I needed before graduation. The school was regionally accredited and the rest of the classes were all quite good, so I chalked this professor up as being a fluke wacko that somehow slipped under the radar.

Class I loved: Counterpoint
Class I didn’t love: German.

Biophysical Chemisty for me.

I had thought I was going to double-major in genetics, and I got As in Organic, slid to a B+ in Biochemistry, and then all the way down to a C in Biophysical Chemistry, and dropped the idea of double-majoring.

Don’t really regret it, either.

A tossup between Thermodynamics and Calculus III. Oddly enough, Differential Equations was a snap.

Nuclear Engineering 150 (Reactor Theory). Took the class, didn’t understand a damn thing, begged out of the final and took an incomplete, then a year later took the final and somehow got a C in the class.

I suspect everyone else in the class was as lost as I was.

Quantum mechanics. It was like learning a whole new language, and I still didn’t really understand it.

Showed up to every class, went to see the professor during office hours, bombed most of the tests, and got a C (essentially, I believe, because the professor believed I was trying my best).

My major was Physics and Astronomy, and I did well in most other classes.

Yeah, for me it was second semester (integral) calculus. It just blindsided me. Up until that point math had always been the easiest subject for me and after cruising through first semester (differential) calc, I didn’t feel like I had to work that hard at it and could focus on my other (engineering) courses. Well, I got a big fat F on my first exam and a D on my second. Fortunately the second half of the course was infinite series, which I found easy again. I got A’s the rest of the way, and managed to understand enough of the integration portion that I got an A on the final and a B in that course. After that class, math got easier for me again, even up to an including differential equations.

One was Real Analysis and the other Hilbert spaces. Hundreds of theorems to learn by heart. Exams with closed books. Russian profs with Gulag teaching manners. It was a nightmare.

I had a class on Linear Equations that I never understood at all. All we had was a book that had a ton of formulas in it. I could not figure out what it was supposed to actually do, where the numbers came from or how I was supposed to use it outside of the classroom. I failed it the first time and only passed the second time because we were allowed to use our calculators and just give the answers. Lot of good that did me. I still, 20 years later, don’t get what the hell was going on.

I also had a really tough time time the logic and proof class I took. I couldn’t grasp some of the logic they were trying to use, the one thing the professor said that made me realize that this class wasn’t for me was when he said you can’t have it raining and the sun be out at the same time when right out the window I could see it raining and the sun.

I know it was me, but they were way too hard for my liking.

Upper.

The class in which I tried the hardest for the smallest level of understanding was Introduction to Art. I have never felt stupider. I just fundamentally didn’t get it.

I had some math electives and some graduate seminars that were almost certainly objectively harder, but Introduction to Art was the highest degree of frustration.

Medieval German Literature.

Can’t even remember the name of the course: Something something antenna design. It was a math seminar course taught by my major professor and he needed bodies. Day one he laid the groundwork by having us all re-deriving Maxwell’s equations.

I remember an image of waves bending around the earth but that’s about it. I passed though!

Statistics - specifically probability theory. We called it Sadistics.

No clue why someone thought that this was an appropriate addition to the computer science program. I passed it (with a B, I think, actually) simply because I and 2 other students always did our homework together. Not as in “cheating”, but as in “let’s work through all this logic together”.

I don’t recall what my final exam grade was, but there was a fairly large curve involved in assigning grades.

The worst for sheer brutality was my comp sci final project class, which involved some truly INSANE hours. I think I wound up with a B- in that class.