The Hardest Class You Ever Had

['Hamas' Jenkins]

I just finished up my coursework for the semester. While Organic I was a comparative breeze, Organic II was a bitch. Honestly, the tests were more of a monster than the actual course load.

Here were the grade breakdowns (all tests were MC):

80-100-A
62-79-B
46-61: C
40-46: D

While the baseline material itself wasn't exceptionally difficult, there were so many exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to exceptions, that the tests ended up as absolute minefields.

With that said, I've heard even worse things about Biochem, and I'm sure that those of you with or pursuing advanced Math/Science degrees have had nightmare courses as well.

What class was it that kicked your ass the hardest?

[prhom]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

That's pretty cool.

Is that the new name for the old "Engineer In Training" exam? I never took it because my career field didn't require it, and I've since regretted not taking it. But at the time it was a situation where it would be bad to fail it and there was nothing to gain by taking it.

That is the new name for it, though I preferred EIT to FE. Had a better ring to it. I decided to take it, and passed, but haven't taken the next step to become a PE. There would be some benefit to it in my field, but it wouldn't result in a pay raise or better job. Someday I hope to do it, but need to be able to commit the time to study for it and do it right.

['Hamas' Jenkins]

Originally Posted by bowener

I was actually coming in here to post this very same thing. Hegel can be such a bitch to read and comprehend. Too ****ing dense to read more than a few pages without wanting to gouge your eyes out. The funny thing is, one of my favorite books I've read is a break down of Hegelian philosophy and how Marx flipped it on its head. It is written by Charles Taylor I believe.

Second most difficult class would be stats or possibly a high level phil course that covered only Kant (taught by Robert Johnson), which isn't terrible, but it was taught to us as if we already had a full understanding of his work, which the majority of us did not. We spent the second half of the semester pouring over an unpublished manuscript by a Harvard professor that was best buds with our professor.

Have you ever read The Arcades Project? Benjamin left it unfinished before his death. It's probably the single most impenetrable thing I've tried to read. We spent about half the semester on it in a Grad-level course I took in High Modernism as an undergrad.

[Nzoner]

I socialized so much in college I actually flunked weightlifting because it was at 9 in the morning.

[CoMoChief]

Originally Posted by Nzoner

I socialized so much in college I actually flunked weightlifting because it was at 9 in the morning.

I got a D in beginning swimming in HS. (and I was on the swim team)

I hardly ever went to that class. It was my Sr year and I just really didn't care either way. Already was accepted in my college.

[mdchiefsfan]

Originally Posted by stonedstooge

Calculus. It was the ONLY class in my university career that I had to keep up with every day. Graduated with a Chemistry major and biology minor

You are a god, sir!!!

[Ming the Merciless]

Not the hardest but interesting story

I was getting ready to graduate, and realized I forgot to take an upper division elective in history...

I went to a fairly small school, and so the offerings were fairly limited...and I realized I was pretty much stuck taking a REALLY hard professor in some world history class I thought I would ace ... since I figured it would be mainly writing and tests....

My plan was basically to take the class and ace it or if I didnt ace it, I was going to switch to credit / no credit (I dunno if they still do this, but we were allowed a couple of credit/no credit courses..)

So any way I go in the class, and the guy basically introduces himself and asks everyone to introduce themselves...and EVERYONE barring me was a history major.....there wasn't one person in this upper division class who wasn't...

So when I tell them I'm not a history major I could see and feel that this guy had it out for me, right away.

Basically if you are even still reading this, I'll try and shorten it HAHA...

So the guy proceeds to give me C's on papers and ding me on some tests.....I really feel like he had it in for me because I wasn't a history major, but I did have my backup plan (cred/no cred)...So I went to the office or whatever the ****, and signed up for credit no credit.

A couple weeks went by and he mustve realized what I had done ..like received some kind of notification...I mean all I had to do was get a C to get credit, and it wouldnt even **** up my Cum Laude honors...

Well he started torching everything I wrote after that, giving me C-'s and D's even. At this point I knew he was out for blood...he didnt want some non history major breezing by credit/no credit in his elite upper division world history club

The day of the final (which I studied my ass off for) I realized I needed to get a B- on the final to get credit for the class..otherwise I would have to find another shitty history class to take ..and maybe not be able to take it cr/no cred

I show up for the final...we were allowed to bring our own books....( I think my paper was about Mussolini / Italy around WW2) and if we used anything from our books we had to cite the sources as endnotes or whatever the **** and then do a list of works cited at the end....

I'm getting nearly done with this beheamoth and I panic because I am running out of room (do they even use bluebooks anymore?) and this dickhead wasn't the kind of guy to let me use paper if I went over...

So I barely get it done in the bluebook , turn that mother****er in.....

and I go home, and about 2 hours later realize that I FORGOT to ****ing list all my references , and page numbers etc...I had just put like (1) and (2) in the text, and was planning on putting them in after I finished my thoughts.

Well, I knew I was ****ed. There was no way I was going to get credit, and I was going to have to take another ****ing history class on top of an already slammed last semester...

I half way thought about trying to call him or talk to him, but I was resigned to my fate......

So a couple weeks later I go to campus to look on the window and I look down at the names...Ahh pawnmower.....B+ on the final

WTF

easy last semester & cum laude

to this day I do not know if he ever even read ANY of my papers because he gave me a B+ on a rushed piece of shit with no sources and was giving me C's and D's on shit I actually tried on....


Not my hardest class but probably the shittiest and most asshole of a professor

[TimBone]

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

Have you ever heard of Math 55? I guess that, while Harvard's math program isn't considered as rigorous as a few other places, that course is supposed to be an absolute slaughterhouse.

Here is a link to a problem set:

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/ic....files/ps9.pdf

Dear lord.....wtf is wrong with those people? Remember yesterday when you told me you couldn't read Chuck Palahniuk's Guts without having to lay down? Well, that's where I'm at after reading two of those problems.

[-King-]

Calculus. Not necessarily because it was hard, but because I was TOTALLY not ready for it. My advisor told me I should skip pre calc because I did very well on the math portion of the ACT and I was a A student in most of my math classes including college algebra.

I got in there and literally had no idea what the **** was going on. There was a professor saying words I'd never heard of in an accent so thick that we probably would have understood him better if he taught in Indian vs. English. I lasted a week before dropping it and picking up pre calc.

But yeah, for classes like those, I learned to pretty much much avoid ESL professors. I had a Korean professor a couple semesters ago for a Psych 322 class. I only understood every 5 words but 99% of what she taught was in the textbook or in the powerpoints so I breezed through even though I couldn't really understand her.

[BlackHelicopters]

I tested out of Calc I and Calc II as a college freshman. Thus, was placed in Calc III as a freshman at Mizzou. I got a C, but had to stay on top of material everyday .

[ping2000]

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

We read large chunks of Phenomenology in my basic Lit Theory class in grad school. Hegel is a terrible writer, but the Master-Slave dialectic and the dialectic itself are tremendously valuable concepts that I used consistently while teaching.

I remember sitting outside the same class right before an exam. We were discussing Modernity. A girl came up to us and interrupted in broken english, "I am also confused by this "maternity". I don't know for sure, but I don't think she passed.

[beach tribe]

Autodesk Advanced Solid/Assembly Modeling.
The entire course load wasn't that big, but the frustration in completing some of the advanced polygon assemblies in time was nervous breakdown inducing.

[loochy]

Algorithm Analysis and Complexity Theory was tough. It was just hard in general.

Mechanics was a killer too. We had a professor from Poland named Kowalski. He was very hard to understand and very stern and angry. I got a 7 on the first test.

['Hamas' Jenkins]

Originally Posted by ping2000

I remember sitting outside the same class right before an exam. We were discussing Modernity. A girl came up to us and interrupted in broken english, "I am also confused by this "maternity". I don't know for sure, but I don't think she passed.

There was a cute German girl in several of my classes my first year of grad school. One day we were talking outside of class and she stopped to get a drink from the fountain. She started talking about how interesting water fountains were and that she never saw them in Germany. Then, I told her about how they used to be segregated. She was stunned by this.

Given her ancestry, I was more than a little amused.

[Fish]

Thermodynamics. I thought that course was going to kill me. Only one professor taught it, and he was a sonofabitch...

[Discuss Thrower]

Western Political Thought.


It was philosophy. Six short papers over philosophy. Aristotle, Thomas More, Locke, Rawls.. et cetera.


I got a decent grade in the class and I'm not sure how because I never got a firm handle on half the coursework. Hated it at the time but in hindsight it was one of the more important classes I took from a wholistic standpoint because it got you thinking about how people (in this case, political scholars) used to think. You become a lot more understanding of other people's decisions once you realize that they are making said decisions from (possibly) a completely different standpoint than you are.

Runner up was the section of a postmodern literature class where we spent 7 weeks discussing Gravity's Rainbow