Worst course ever taken in school or elsewhere!

[EastWest Gal]

Biochem major at UC Berkeley. Best courses: 3 quarters of organic chemistry taught by visiting professors. Superb lectures, clear textbook, excellently paced lab with great grad students as TAs in the lab. And since my dad was an organic chemist, I got a bit of coaching from home.

Worst class: Diplomatic history of the United States. I chose it because of time, needed a gen Ed class, and very short book list. Walked into class and she had the books stacked on the table and the list on a board. 7 books for a 10 week class. She droned on and on about the Revolutionary War for 5 weeks-her book, her specialty. We quickly formed a note-taking group and I recorded all the lectures as part of that group. She truly knew how to make an interesting topic really boring.[emoji99]

 

[jollystomper]

Funny, I enjoyed differential equations and Matrix Analysis. I still have my "Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems" and "Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory" textbooks (though this thread prompted me to open them for the first time in probably 30 years ).

 

[freedomatlast]

Thermodynamics was the "weed out" course for my ME class. The first day, the professor said everyone look to your left. Now look to your right. Two of the three won't be here by the end of this course. And he was right. Studied my butt off and did fine. Others quit engineering and took business courses.
Made Diff EQ seem like a piece of cake.

 

[Badger]

I did fine with the 40+ hours in biology and 24 hours in chemistry classes during undergrad. Unfortunately the second semester of history I left until my last year and those that were offered were not available for my schedule so I had to take a correspondence course. It consisted of reading a dry and boring text and taking tests that were mailed back and forth by the professor who agreed to accept that responsibility. No one for discussions or to ask for clarification. I enjoy history just not out of a text book.


Cheers!

 

[Winemaker]

Thermodynamics was the "weed out" course for my ME class. The first day, the professor said everyone look to your left. Now look to your right. Two of the three won't be here by the end of this course. And he was right. Studied my butt off and did fine. Others quit engineering and took business courses.
Made Diff EQ seem like a piece of cake.

A similar quote was given to me at an Freshman Engineering Lecture at Orientation. Only it was in addition to left and right, it was behind and in front of you. So one out of five. My best friend and I were sitting next to each other and we didn't like his scare tactics, we vowed to to disrupt him. The numbers may have been correct, but both of us graduated with BS of Engineering degrees. Our other HS classmates who were in Engineering school there, not so much. Two out of eight.

 

[EastWest Gal]

Thermodynamics was the "weed out" course for my ME class. The first day, the professor said everyone look to your left. Now look to your right. Two of the three won't be here by the end of this course. And he was right. Studied my butt off and did fine. Others quit engineering and took business courses.

Made Diff EQ seem like a piece of cake.

I think Thermodynamics was my sister’s weed out course. Chemical engineering degree at UC Berkeley. Turns out she hated the job, moved to Washington, and took up nursing instead.

 

[Hillbilly]

Differential equations

 

[scrabbler1]

Thermodynamics was the "weed out" course for my ME class. The first day, the professor said everyone look to your left. Now look to your right. Two of the three won't be here by the end of this course. And he was right. Studied my butt off and did fine. Others quit engineering and took business courses.
Made Diff EQ seem like a piece of cake.

While there was no "weeding out" element, The second of 2 required writing workshop courses I took in my freshman year of college turned out this way. The class began with about 15-20 students but we were losing about 1 per week in the first ~5 weeks due to the awful instructor. I also despised the instructor and withdrew from the class in the 6th week, in time to not get an Incomplete for the course. I had become friends with someone in the class, and she told me they were down to at most 10 students by the time the semester had ended. I took the class again in my sophomore year and had a much better instructor and enjoyed that class and got a B, the best grade I hoped I could get.

 

[MRG]

Assembly language programming. The class was 47 students at the beginning, 7 at the end.

 

[Gumby]

The hardest school I ever attended was Navy Nuclear Power School, followed closely by the civilian nuclear power school required to qualify as a senior reactor operator on the GE BWR-6 reactor in Perry, Ohio (where I had to drop my atavistic aversion to boiling in the core).

Law school was a piece of cake by comparison.

 

[Koolau]

IIRC I completed my non-thesis Masters degree with a 3.97 GPA. I was taking the course w*rk while w*rking at Megacorp. I was also a TA in the field I was getting the degree in and actually taught the lab courses for the Prof. I needed a Toxicology course and the only one available was given by the Pharmacy School. The Prof and I went to the Tox. Dept. Head who we knew pretty well and told him what "our" students (grad and undergrad) would need. He promised the course would be designed around our needs. Everything was fine and I Aced the first two tests in the course. Then, the arrogant head of the Pharmacy School decided he wanted to do one lecture on his favorite Tox. subject. And the Tox. head couldn't turn him down. The subject had nothing to do with the the Tox. that our (my) students needed. So, I was at the lecture and took notes, but didn't figure the subject would be a major portion of the final. It was. Half the final was on that one lecture. Though I received a B on the final, it was a "low" B. Then, averaging the 3 test grades came up 0.01 below the cut-off for an A in the course. Hence the 3.97 instead of a 4.00. I even asked the Tox guy for a special dispensation but he all but told me the Pharmacy head would find out and not like it. It was then I learned that politics are even worse in Universities than in industry. YMMV

 

[fh2000]

I still have nightmare with my Discrete Math. It was a requirement toward my CS degree. I waited till the last quarter to take it and I struggled a lot. After the final, I ran out of money and packed everything in my Grand Torino ready to head for California.

But the professor went on vacation. The grades won't be posted for another week. I needed at least a C to graduate. I could not wait that long to find out so I went to the math department. The lady would not tell me my grade. After a long plead I said you do not need to review my grade, but I needed a C to graduate. Now, can you tell me if I graduated? She hesitated and finally looked into the drawer and said with a smile "congratulations!".

 

[Out-to-Lunch]

I was a physics major. I didn't love Diff Eq because of the abstract way the math prof taught it, but it was not so bad.

However, the worst course I had was because of the way it was taught, not the subject matter. Upper-division Electricity & Magetism. Our prof told us that he decided to try an experiment. He taught this undergrad course at a level ABOVE the equivalent grad course. He used differential forms and wedge products, etc. This approach allows the four Maxwell equations to be expressed as one equation plus its twin in dual space. Very powerful and very abstruse.

This was all so far over our heads that it wasn't funny. Initially, we were like deer in the headlights, but eventually we settled down to sit there like the heads on Easter Island: immobile, impassive, non-comprehending.

In grad school, Electrodynamics is a difficult rite of passage, nearly universally taught from a book that everyone in Physics just calls "Jackson." I recall this course being like a breath of fresh air: it made E&M look so understable compared to my undergrad experience! It used just normal (albeit quite advanced) vector calculus! So simple!

 

[Koolau]

By the way, during my undergrad degree, I too struggled with DiffEQ. I somehow got a B in it and have no idea how I did it. I had planned to take one more Math course and DiffEQ convinced me I had reached my personal wall.

The other course I struggled with was a physics course. I forget the actual name - it was a 300 level physics course. It was essentially "The Physics of Quantum Mechanics" (my name, not theirs.) All I recall was discussing mu mesons and the Schrodinger Equation. Most of us in the class called it Science Fiction 351. I got a B but, again, have no idea how.

Several folks have mentioned struggling with Fortran. I was intimidated by the course when I first signed up. I'd never even seen a computer (ca. 1968). Guess what? I only saw "The Computer" once during Fortran - it was in a glass enclosed room and only grad students ran the big bank of tape players and processors, etc. We mere students never stepped foot inside the room. We just punched cards at 2:00AM and submitted our decks for running.

BUT, I got the most amazing teacher in the world. I would describe her (visually) as a cross between Joan Crawford and Jacqueline Kennedy - Age about 45+. She related to us no-nothing, wide-eyed computer-neophytes. In the most basic terms, she explained what we were doing, why and how it all worked. She could have taught a drama class as she flitted to and fro at the black board. She was infinitely patient and could always understand what my lame question was really asking.

I fell in love with her (well, you know what I mean.) I got to where I could submit my jobs and NOT get it back due to Hollerith statement errors. When it was time for the final, it was the only final I didn't study for in my life. I aced it and the course. I NEVER used Fortran and it's too bad. I'm still impressed with the power of the language though it was cumbersome due to the requirements to use formatting statements (and you'd better not misplace one comma or parenthesis!) I guess (other than Philosophy) the course was my most useless college-level course. Still, it was possibly my favorite. Who knew?

 

[Philliefan33]

I was a Chemistry major. I LOVED Organic Chemistry (it helps to be able to see/think in three dimensions).

My two worst classes were Diff EQ and P-Chem. I managed an A in each, but that was due to lots of study/cramming. I never fully understood either of them.

I had a 3.98 GPA as an undergrad. I got an A in every course except one: I got a B in racquetball. [emoji851]

 

[aja8888]

OP here....funny, some of you mentioned Thermodynamics as a "deal breaker" type course. For me, I loved that course and aced it with no problem.

 

[O2Bfree]

My toughest class was calculus. I was in my late 20s when I took my first calculus class as a Technical Communication major. I went into it with moderate confidence, since a few years earlier I'd aced pre-calc at a local community college that had a highly-rated math department. My confidence took a hit the first day when the professor announced that the class was a weeding-out class for diffy-q, and that much of the material would be review since most of us had taken calculus in high school and it was fresh in our minds. He proceeded to fly through the material, and the problems on the tests seemed only vaguely related to his lessons. I got Cs on most of the tests, but ended up with a B in the class because of my exceptional homework. I spent hours on it every weekend, elaborately documenting and illustrating every step of each problem on page after page of engineering paper. I missed only 1 point the whole quarter, and the TAs loved my homework because they could use it during grading to quickly see where other students' solutions had gone off track.

Fortunately, I didn't need diffy-q for the tech comm degree!

 

[Lewis Clark]

The hardest school I ever attended was Navy Nuclear Power School, followed closely by the civilian nuclear power school required to qualify as a senior reactor operator on the GE BWR-6 reactor in Perry, Ohio (where I had to drop my atavistic aversion to boiling in the core).

Law school was a piece of cake by comparison.

What made Navy Nuclear Power School (NNPS) challenging to me was the pace of the material. The pace was about double the work load of a typical college student in terms of classroom time each week (30 hours vs 15 hours) plus a major chunk of time doing far more homework and studying than my college courses required

And I got to do it twice, first while enlisted and then as an officer.

NNPS was much harder than my undergraduate engineering degree or either of my two masters degrees.

 

[Koolau]

OP here....funny, some of you mentioned Thermodynamics as a "deal breaker" type course. For me, I loved that course and aced it with no problem.

I didn't love it, but was able to learn enough (50+ years ago - not now) to manipulate equations and do well on the tests. What I DID retain was a basic understanding. In thermodynamics, the key thing to remember is "there is no free lunch" (wait, maybe that was economics, or maybe chemistry, no wait... life.) YMMV

 

[scrabbler1]

In my senior year's final semester at NYU (in 1985), I took an actuarial exam review course to help me brush up for what was at the time Part 1 of the Actuarial exams (Calculus). I only needed three 4-credit courses to graduate, so this additional 2-point course was not required but would be useful because I was seeking a job in the field after graduation and getting the help to pass the exams was crucial.

The professor gave out several practice exam booklets and we would go over anything from the old exams we wanted help with. But when it came time for our grade, he gave us an old exam from 1973, a time when these exams were more difficult and the questions much different from those we had been seeing and studying from in the early 1980s exams.

I had been doing well on the early 1980s exams, so this threw me for a loop. I got a B on the exam which was my disappointing grade for the course. However, a week later I aced the actual Actuarial exam (got a 9 out of 10) and with it saw my starting salary increase on Day One at my new job (the results came out the day I started in July).

The B on the course's final exam looked like it was going to very slightly reduce my GPA to below 3.70 and prevent me from graduating Magna Cum Laude. But like the other good break I mentioned earlier, about seeing a D disappear from my GPA, this B also disappeared because it was deemed "Excess Credit," beyond what I needed to graduate. So, a B in a 2-point course being excluded raised my GPA just enough to round up to 3.70 and get me those Magna Cum Laude honors. I didn't learn of this until I got my final transcript a month after I graduated and had begun working at my new job, so it was a bit anti-climactic.

I was tempted to show the professor my actual exam grade of 9 before chewing him out for using a 1973 exam for our course's grade, but I decided not to.

 

[Boose]

First semester at college - I signed up for Japanese 101, which met MWF at 8 a.m. with the expectation that students would spend the two days off in the language lab, if I remember correctly. The professor taught immersion-style and the second phrase I learned after "ohayo gozaimasu" was "anno..." ("uh..."), which I employed liberally. Smart kid that I was, I realized that my study habits and Japanese teaching philosophy didn't mix, so I withdrew and enrolled in Religion 101 (which was inexplicably about Kant and Kierkegaard, not a survey of world religions).

I wound up graduating with a Women's and Ethnic Studies self-designed curriculum, before those were actual majors at colleges. Then I married an engineer, we saved our pennies, and we have made 3 visits to Japan so far.

 

[pacergal]

Ugh--required speech in HS and College--difficult for an introvert!
In HS, physics and calculus were the worst--ended up dropping them both before the deadline.
In College, Organic Chem and Pharmacology

 

[aja8888]

I didn't love it, but was able to learn enough (50+ years ago - not now) to manipulate equations and do well on the tests. What I DID retain was a basic understanding. In thermodynamics, the key thing to remember is "there is no free lunch" (wait, maybe that was economics, or maybe chemistry, no wait... life.) YMMV

Yes, I recall my DW said something to me about "no free lunch" just before we got married.

Yikes! I took Thrmo 49 years ago...boy, time does fly.

 

[tmm99]

Not by the difficulty of classes themselves, but the hardest were the classes that started way too early for this night owl. I just couldn't stay awake!

 

[tmm99]

Assembly language programming. The class was 47 students at the beginning, 7 at the end.

I was one of the 40 students you mention. [emoji23] I dropped out fairly early on, as I didn't want it to affect my GPA.