Hardest classes you've taken

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Hand Drafting and Hydraulic/Fluid Mechanics were the two hardest classes I took, not because the coursework was difficult, but because the instructors were.

The former was an 80-year old woman who was very conservative in her teaching methods, and could not give constructive criticism well. The latter had several businesses in Baton Rouge and Lafayette that got flooded so he spent most of his time fixing them up instead of teaching the class. The book was big, dull, and falling apart at the seams.
 
Calculus I-III
Discrete math
C data structures

Also, I once took a macroeconomics class in an accelerated one-week semester in May between the spring and summer semesters. Class from 8-6, midterms on Wednesday, finals on Friday.
 
I've been lucky to have a lot of great teachers in my college years and the free tutoring center was great (for a while anyway, there's some drama about that) so even math hasn't been too awful for me. The class that really stands out is actually a Mexican Art History class I took a year ago.

This particular class was split into two semesters, and I had each section with a different teacher. First semester went well, the second sucked. My teacher was a very strange woman that had the air of being only vaugly familiar with how human interations and communication was supposed to work. Her voice was usually super soft and high pitched but occasionally he would let out a freaky shrieking laugh. Very pale too, now that I think about it she was probably some form of vampire which is why I was so mentally drained after her class. She was a combination of boring and unsettling while teaching which I would have been able to deal with if she wasn't so bad at explaining assignments. Everyone struggled to understand what the hell she wanted us to do and she was impossible to communicate with. She'd write something weird and vague on a assignment sheet and she wouldn't understand why you were even asking her about it. I failed a paper because I didn't do something she never told me to do in the first place and her justification was that I was supposed to *know* what she wanted me to do. She'd get so patronizing about it and for me that got me salty as shit. History is my best subject by far, my U.S History professor and the head if the history department would gush about how I was one of their top students. I once got a huge award on behalf of the college specifically for my performance in history classes so when this art history teacher who was potentially a vampire started giving me crap about not understanding her terrible directions and supposedly struggling with the subject I got pretty damn indignant.

In a more humerous note there was also the time she tried to teach us about Afro-Cuban history by showing us a Beyonce music video. More than once in class she used the words "problematic" and "mansplain-y". She's also the first person I've ever heard say latinx out loud.
Overall it was very boring, stressful, mentally draining, and deeply dissapointing class. Mexico has so much cool art and history, but this class was a horrible example of it. Still got a B though!
 
Honestly, it was some 100 level introduction to agronomy course, and the only reason it was "hard" is because I didn't give a shit, and the professor was this little African guy in a bow tie with a thick accent who ranted like an insane person. Guy was cool as fuck, I just didn't understand half of what he was saying.

I'm the first to admit that the degree I'm pursuing (horticulture) is a complete fucking joke. It's the lesbian dance theory of STEM, both in difficulty and projected job opportunities and pay. I've blown through about three quarters of the required classes in the department, including a few 400 and 500 level classes with a perfect 4.0. Most of the classes are just memorizing lists of information, and even the "sciencey" classes like plant physiology and plant propagation aren't terribly complex.

This upcoming semester I'm taking all gen-eds, so I expect to hit the wall pretty hard. Organic chem, generic plant genetics, that kind of stuff. But I'm also enrolled in "Landscape Architecture of Antiquity", so there's going to be a balance.
 
Let me preface this by saying my fucking university is a disaster when it comes to IT. Because IT is competing against Telecomm Engineering, we have some courses about signals were we "try" to know most of the TE Syllabus (obviously we end up doing almost jack shit). Those courses are among the hardest. Its names are: Digital Systems and Specific-Applied Hardware.

Then all the damn courses of Logical Programming, because the teachers are shit.
 
In grad school, I had to take Research Methods, which is basically the logic and psychology behind how good research is implemented. Sounds easy, right? The professor was a nice guy but was completely ruthless when it came to grading. Studied my brains out for the final and STILL ended up failing it. Luckily, my essay assignments managed to score me a B in the class.
 
Alto dijo:
In grad school, I had to take Research Methods, which is basically the logic and psychology behind how good research is implemented. Sounds easy, right? The professor was a nice guy but was completely ruthless when it came to grading. Studied my brains out for the final and STILL ended up failing it. Luckily, my essay assignments managed to score me a B in the class.
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I'd forgotten the horror of Research Methods (and stats too). Pure hell, as well as being dry and boring as fuck. It was compulsory at my grad school and I only just scraped through, so I totally feel you on this one. It doesn't help that it often feels like worlds away from the subject grad students are studying.
 
UselessRubberKeyboard dijo:
I'd forgotten the horror of Research Methods (and stats too). Pure hell, as well as being dry and boring as fuck. It was compulsory at my grad school and I only just scraped through, so I totally feel you on this one. It doesn't help that it often feels like worlds away from the subject grad students are studying.
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What would you say is harder Quantitive reasoning or Stats, thats what Im faced with taking for my next level math class.
 
I have to admit, it was Intro to Java, partly because it's one of my university's weed-out courses for their notoriously hard to get into CS major (I was taking it because I wanted to do Informatics), it assumed you had already taken programming, and because the professor couldn't teach, but also because my brain just couldn't grasp object oriented programming, and that's something you get or you don't. I plan on taking Intro to Python, but the professor for that is someone I've had and who I know is good.

And Intermediate Macroeconomics, which is a requirement for my major, and on the first day the professor said 'this is going to be the hardest class you'll ever take in the undergraduate econ department at [school]'. And I got a C+, which I'm disappointed in myself in, but it was really challenging. The graphs were what got me.

Yellow Shirt Guy dijo:
What would you say is harder Quantitive reasoning or Stats, thats what Im faced with taking for my next level math class.
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I don't know what level of Stats you're taking, but I 100% agree with Dizzydent that z scores are the worst. Even using a calculator doing problems with them was incredibly tedious, and if you have to do the calculations by hand...there's just a lot of very boring figuring overall.
 
Yellow Shirt Guy dijo:
What would you say is harder Quantitive reasoning or Stats, thats what Im faced with taking for my next level math class.
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I'd go with what @Crunchy Leaf said too - stats. It's boring as hell and tedious. My view is pretty skewed by being a humanities student with a brain that struggles with math, though, so you might find it a lot easier. The boring is less simple to deal with.
 
I'm a sped so I still can't undestand basic high school math.

I binge watch numberphile videos though. This is one of my biggest sorrows, I just wanted to be good at mathematics. It was one of my childhood dreams, I failed.
 
I struggled with Statistics 1 in community college and failed the course. Difficult problems aside, it's not so much the material I had a hard time understanding (I'm great at math) as it was the professor's BS teaching methods that threw me off. However, I retook it and Stats 2 during the summer intersession and passed them with Bs.

Fuck Intro to Logic, though- way to deceit me with what I thought would be simple problems and feed me a bunch of migraine-inducing, pseudo-coding nonsense. It didn't help that the professor was a decrepit geezer who made even the easier problems hard to grasp. I dropped out of the class in 2 weeks.
 
Última edición:
Not higher education but I went to a high school that had lots of money and bad planning and for some reason they had forgotten to plan gym class for a long time. So we had to put in the requisite hours and they signed everyone up to a gym with an instructor/leader that really kept up the pace. We weren't unfit guys and gals or anything but holy shit a lot of us had to puke in the locker room between the sessions, and there were multiple of them each day. Had to get those hours.

Another tricky thing was a math class with a teacher that spoke 95% russian and communicated how things worked by looking at everyone and gesturing to the white board. She was really good at math though and seriously helped me out by photocopying the entire textbook for me.
 
Ever spent 2 years on a single paper?

Yeah, stop wondering why I drink.

Semi jokes aside, one of the hardest classes I ever took was algebra 2 because my teacher was so god awful she left myself, and the rest of the class thinking we were stupid when she was a poor teacher. I never had a teacher so bad before, where you honestly couldn't tell at the time they were the problem and not you.

I think most people know I've taken a lot of time in education and some of the stat classes made me want to blow my brains out due to the difficulty of them, but in a sick way I enjoyed them. All that effort you see what the tool of math can do and that makes hours upon hours of struggle worth while. It's a lot faster reward than seeing the grade at the end of the semester where lots of classes I didn't feel a reward until the passing grade came.

The hardest with out a doubt for me was teaching MAT012 (high school level stuff) because this was the first time I was given the reins 100% the math was not hard for me but to lay it out and deal with making sure everyone had a good chance to do well, understand and get a grounding to build off was not easy. You know that piece of paper handed to you in the first class where you look at test dates and throw out? Those cause more sleepless nights than your mid terms, I promise.
 
I feel like an idiot, most people here have answers like Calculus, Fluid Mechanics, etc and here the hardest classes I ever took was Algebra 2/College Algebra, mainly because of factoring quadratics. I know on a basic level what factoring is but in practice I am just lost and my grade in class ended up suffering since the second half of the year was pretty much focused solely on that. Despite my profile name and picture I am just not an Algebra person (I fared better in Geometry), nobody in my immediate family is. At least I went above my mom who never went beyond Pre-Algebra when she was in college.
 
Classical studies. My classmates used to gang up on me so I struggled in that class. Was eventually withdrawn from that class so didn't have to sit exams for it or anything.

That and psychology. Did it for a semester at uni and struggled greatly. I was never any good at science, so why I took that class I don't know.
 
UselessRubberKeyboard dijo:
I'd forgotten the horror of Research Methods (and stats too). Pure hell, as well as being dry and boring as fuck. It was compulsory at my grad school and I only just scraped through, so I totally feel you on this one. It doesn't help that it often feels like worlds away from the subject grad students are studying.
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Research Methods was pretty easy for me in grad school, but I only got through stats by pure luck. In undergrad I took a few stats courses and got As, but my graduate level Stat I kicked my ass all over campus. Thank the LORD it was pass/fail for some odd reason.

98 on the first exam (through luck, our exams were multiple choice), 88 on the second, 78 on the third. Some of my cohort liked the class and professor so much they went and took Stat II for an elective. Bitches be crazy.
 
Chemistry 121

Got an A in the lab class however, I'm just really bad at abstract math.
 
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