Hardest classes you've taken

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The very first class I ever took in my freshman year of college. Intro to critical thinking. It started off pretty straightforward but then eventually became very technical and very difficult. The professor was a chill dude and understood the class was hard and did what he could to help you pass. I remember asking other people about their critical thinking classes since that is something most freshman get out of the way at my university and they all said their class was extremely easy shit. My professsor's class was hard but I passed with a C-. Fuck yea.
 
Biology 101 and it was 100% the teacher. He was an old southern guy who looked and sounded like Colonel Sanders. He spent every lecture talking about his boyhood and youth spent as a picker during various harvest seasons and traveling the southern states.

The worst part is that his stories were absolutely enthralling and awesome. I’d have loved his class if he was teaching Southern Culture (a sociology class I took that was excellent).

Regardless, he’d spend our lectures chatting and labs were just the same thing in a lab setting. I think we completed one actual experiment in our whole semester. He’d pass out study guides which were completely useless after my first test.

The only reason I got an A in that class is because I basically read and studied the entire textbook.

When I got to the next level bio class my instructor actually asked who’d taken the first class with The Colonel (her words) and asked us to stay after our first class. Turns out he’d only taught about 2/3 of the textbook and we were woefully unprepared. She got us hooked up in a study group and even dropped into several of our meetings to help catch us up. I got an A in her class too but only out of sheer determination and some of the most stressful months of my college career.

I later found out that he retired after one more semester.
 
Two of my harder classes were:

General Physics I. One of my graduation requirements was a year of Physics. I chose General since it used non-calculus math. I bristled when a math professor that term referred to it as "Physics for Poets" because of how hard it was for me. I'm not sure if it was the extensive theory or lack of interest in the lectures, but I got a C on my first exam. Knowing i could have done better, I bought the study guide and put more effort into it - and still got a C on the next exam. So, i conceded I'd get a C in the class (and did) and focused on doing better in my other classes. General Physics II proved to be a little easier as I had a better time with studying electricity, magnetism, and optics. I even managed to get a B-minus.

20th Century American Literature. I took this class solely because i needed a fourth class and nothing else looked good that semester. I had American Lit in high school, but this was nothing like that. I was absent for a school function the day books were assigned for individual oral reports. So, I was stuck with a book I knew nothing about and nobody else wanted. Worst, the teacher was a feminist (this was before SJW but when PC was alive and becoming toxic), and no matter what I did, I couldn't get above a C on any assignment. Despite doing my best on my presentation and getting very positive feedback from my classmates - which was supposed to make up part of the grade - my teacher ripped the presentation to shreds in her written evaluation. Once again, I got another C. She must have been impressed by my final exam essay, though. My final grade was a C-plus.

dunbrine47 dijo:
Academic Research and Writing (A.K.A Comp 2): Course was themed on horror and fairytales.
Presiona para expandir...

That sounds a bit bizarre. My Comp 2 class focused on written argumentation and research. As mentioned, this was before college campuses were too immersed in the PC/SJW movement, so our writing exercises included topics such as "Should the US have bombed Hiroshima/Japan." I also enjoyed my final term paper and the research I did for it.

If I was taking the same major now, I'd have to take Technical Writing instead of Comp 2. Needless to say, I'm glad I went when I did for that and other reasons.
 
Kiwi Lime Pie dijo:
That sounds a bit bizarre. My Comp 2 class focused on written argumentation and research. As mentioned, this was before college campuses were too immersed in the PC/SJW movement, so our writing exercises included topics such as "Should the US have bombed Hiroshima/Japan." I also enjoyed my final term paper and the research I did for it.

If I was taking the same major now, I'd have to take Technical Writing instead of Comp 2. Needless to say, I'm glad I went when I did for that and other reasons.
Presiona para expandir...
Research and written argumentation were apart of the course. The primary sources we were using for the assignments were fairytales and horror. For example: one of our assignments involved arguing about if Jack Torrance (The Shinning) and Hermann (The Queen of Spades) were being manipulated by an outside supernatural force or everything driving these characters was happening in their minds. Our quotations had to come from the movie/story and from other authors commentating on the subject.

The only other "themed" Comp course I remember off the top of my head was "American Alternative Cultures" but there were others. Fun fact: after I graduated English Writing was restructured. That course is now called: Comp 2: Research and Argument. From what it looks like on the website, the themed sources look like they have been replaced outright or given less emphasis.
 
Biology 101.

Professor barely spoke English. Quickly regretted I picked that class.
 
I haven't ever had to take the class but soil mechanics is one of the most brutal subjects I've ever encountered. The math itself isn't very difficult and only requires entry-level calculus at the most, and just looking at the variables you start with it also doesn't seem terribly complicated. But it gets much, much worse as you go on, and to top it all off the class it about the most boring substances known to man.

Rock mechanics though, that's where it's at.
 
dunbrine47 dijo:
Research and written argumentation were apart of the course. The primary sources we were using for the assignments were fairytales and horror.
Presiona para expandir...

Thanks for the clarification, @dunbrine47 . I can't help but wonder how much of a struggle it might be for people who dislike horror for any reason. For those into it, this was probably a fun way to explore their interest through writing.
 
For some ungodly reason, the basic entry level health class that everyone is required to take at my college ended up being very difficult to get a good grade in. The homework was stupid easy but the tests often were much harder and the teacher required really specific answers that didn't show up in the homework. The grading was super steep also. I feel like she had some weird system where we all started with Fs and had to work our way up? I'm probably misremembering but getting an A was just about impossible. You actually could tell how the other students were doing because my teacher had a chart printed out with all the grades and a codename that we picked for ourselves. So you could see that BigBoner420 had a 15% along with half the class. To be fair the reason so many people were failing is because they were genuinely too fucking stupid to do their homework, but at the same time the five people who were trying to get A's were unsuccessful. Me and one other person were right at the top of the grading scale, competing to be the one and only A grade in this basic goddamn health class that realistically your average chimpanzee should be able to handle. At the end of the semester the other person got the coveted A with me getting a high B, and 14 others failing.

I do have a funny story about a study session though, we did a unit on sexual health and got to learn about all sorts of spicy, erotic, subjects like anal sex and chlamydia. The guy I was studying with was going down these terms for the test and was confused on what oral sex was. and needed an explanation. 19 year old dude. No idea. I was so flummoxed that I had to actually explain that to an adult that I gave a really clinical explaination and jumped to something else. That poor guy, though!
 
Mine was actually in high school: Calculus 1. However, it was only because the teacher was terrible at her job. I can't remember specifics, but the way she taught it was very confusing, and the lessons took up the entire hour because no one understood her crazy methods of solving the equations. After the first week, I stopped paying attention to her and read the textbook to understand what to do.

Sounds fine, right? Well, I couldn't ask for help with anything I didn't get, because she considered the textbook 'flawed' and would try to force me to use her methods. This meant I had to sometimes work backwards and develop from guesswork, which inevitably bit me in the ass down the line, and I would have to re-evaluate what I had just gotten down.

I basically taught myself calculus, without any assistance outside of an old textbook, and I still ended up with the highest score in the class.
 
Sociology in college.

Not because the actual work was difficult, but because the professor used the class to push a political agenda. Students that parroted his rhetoric and agreed with him got high grades, while those who either didn't agree or tried arguing a neutral perspective or sticking to discussing what we actually were supposed to be learning got low marks and ridicule. This was around the time I started to notice a far left agenda being pushed over education in college. I'm surprised I made it out of the class with a low C.

In high school, Trigonometry was my worst because I just couldn't seem to grasp it that well.
 
- Mineralogy (lots of systems and rote learning, very tedious)
- Petrology (extremely abstract when trying to determine metamorphic pathways for a given rock and extrapolate formation conditions)
- University Physics 2 (Calculus 2 based physics, never took Calc 2)
- Calculus (higher math brainlet)
- Geology Senior Seminar (my research was turbo fucked because my research partner dropped out and didn't give me the data I needed to draw any real conclusions, managed to pass out of circumstances beyond my control.)
 
Última edición:
There was a stupid English class where the grading was either pass or fail, and the teacher was very picky as to what passed.

Unsurprisingly, I dropped that class.

As for actual hardest, I almost always struggled learning math.
 
Geochemistry. Mrs. Emoji graduated top of her class in chemistry with a math minor had a hard time helping me and two friends study for that class, and she aced her inorganic chem classes.
 
I always had issues with programming. I'm more into the Network side of things, so Coding 101 is already challenging.
Or maybe I'm just challenged.
 
College Chemistry I and II. It was all fun and games until you got to Thermochemistry/dynamics and Kinetics. I was never the best in algebraic-esque math and I had to retake both classes at one point. For Chem I, I had to find loopholes just to pass with a B-.
 
Philosophy of mathematics, Peano Postulates and such things. That shit turned my brain to cheese.
 
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