OT: Hardest class at U-M?
I saw the "Easiest class at U-M?" post and thought that some might find the opposite question interesting.
My hardest class? "Dynamics of Mechanical Systems" I think it was M.E. 340. That (and M.E. 240, come to think of it) just didn't "click" for me. Interestingly, most of my classmates did not share my opinion. They typically chose Fluids or Heat Transfer.
My easiest? A 100-level (Social) Psychology course. It was interesting and almost laughably easy. I took it during my senior year.
Placed out of Calc I & II, so they put me in Honors Calc III my first semester freshmen year. I understood the material well enough but the exams were absurd. The mid-term had 5 questions. I got answers for 2, and both were wrong. I got a B+. Only 1 person in the class got a correct answer, and only for 1 question.
It's a 4 credit class now and was very easy. They actually made it harder over winter break this yesr because most people didn't bother going to the class.
Wow. It must've changed a lot since I took it in 06-07. This was my life in the Dude or Ugli basement for hours upon hours that semester
in 950 lines of IBM 370 assembly language. Your error was somewhere in a box of punchcards and the only way to find it was to visually read every damn card. Troubleshooting tools? What are those?
Do people actually call it the "Dude"? It was called the Media Union when I was in UG, and I remember that when the University renamed it the Duderstadt Center and started pushing the "Dude" moniker to encourage use of the new name, I thought it seemed awkward and contrived.
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The second calc-based physics. I remember one exam without equal signs or numbers. Got like a 3/20 on it.
So glad I switched out of engineering after that.
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Yeah the exams for this class were ridiculous. Was convinced I failed the final because I missed the class that went over Laplace transforms. Got a 32. Class average was a 29! Our GSI who f'in taught us the materials got a 57. Absurd
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I took the econ weeder courses and they were hard. Nothing compared though to taking Japanese to fullfill my language requirement. As 17 year old midwestern kid I thought it "would be neat" to learn Japanese. That class was 50% Japanese American kids who talked a little Japanese at home with Grandma or whoever, 49% white kids who lived in Japan for a few years with their expat parents, 1% me. I got my ass so severely kicked on that curve. Plus it was 5 credits, every day of the week, with substantial preparation for each class. I pass/failed the last 2 semesters and a KNOW they passed me out of pity. I never worked so hard to suck at something.
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ChE 330 was brutal. I learned a ton, but the work load absolutely destroyed. The other ChE classes are harder in material, but nothing will ever top the amount of time that I had to devote to that class. No one even knows what fugacity is anyway.
Not sure who you had for this one, but having Ziff as a professor didn't help either. He loves thermodynamics, and most of the time it was like "get a room" between him and his chalkboard math. Way too much theory for me.
And yes, I'm pretty sure fugacity was some kind of messed up trust fall gullibility test.
My hardest class was (IIRC) History 440, the History of Ancient Mesopotamia. It didn't help that my GSI was Argentinian and had a heavy accent, so I could barely understand her during seminar.
Differential Equations. That's about when Math ceased to be any more fun and became a nightmare. A big part of the problem was the instructor was this Chinese guy who's English was HORRIBLE. I could only comprehend about a 1/4 of what he said. I'm still not sure how I passed the class.
I think we may have had the same professor. 8 am timing for me didnt help either. Broken english with a hangover is a bad combination.
The worst I've ever felt about anything in my life was the time I signed up for a stats class winter semester, senior year. I needed it to graduate. Got to the first section already struggling over the first lecture material, and the TA was this totally hapless Asian grad student who could barely speak English. I felt so bad for her, because she was obviously uncomfortable. And, of course, I couldn't follow a single thing going on, especially considering I was a humanities person who did not do math.
So I went home, cruised the TA rosters for a name that wasn't Asian, and signed up for a new section. All while feeling like a humongous racist...
Ended up dropping the class entirely the next week and picking up an incredibly easy stats course with half the hockey team. Took it pass/fail, got a C, and I graduated. Winning.
I've told this story a few times, but here it goes again. I was taking whatever the 2nd semester of 1st year calc is, and we had a Chinese GSI whom no one could understand. One of the students apparently raised hell at the math department, and the next day, the freakin' chairman of the department was teaching our class.
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A couple of my 400 level finance classes were very technically challenging. Options and Futures was pretty wild, and the Fixed Income Securities class I took had some absolutely insane exams.
In undergrad it was the calculus-based physics course (forgot what it was called, but man, I was lost and luckily passed). Pharmacy School was a ton more work than UG. The therapeutics section on the heart was ridiculous.
I went to school in late 80's and I'm sure they had some sort of standard but the english proficiency of my science / math TAs was abysmal Not sure passing the TOEFL exam was even a requirement back then because Mr. Kim, Calculus 115 TA, could not speak a lick of english. He could say "hello" and that was it. We had to write our questions down and submit to him on paper. He would then take them home, translate them and provide answers the next day in class.
My struggles also could've been due to my first semester way from home and a fake ID that worked at the liquor store at the corner of Sate and Williams.
My son had this experience as a freshman in high school with geometry honors, reputed to be the hardest class in his high school. Third quarter, he had a Korean grad student associate teacher from Northwestern who spoke virtually no English, and admitted sometimes he didn't even understand the material. So not only did my son not understand the material, the teacher didn't understand it either, and when he did, the students couldn't understand him. This in addition to the school-provided tutor who was legally blind and had carpal tunnel syndrome so she couldn't adequately read the braille textbook. Not a good year for math instruction.
But my hardest class thus far is EECS 280. I love coding but it's a lot of work. The feeling when you finish a project and realize you built an entire euchre game though is very satisfying.
If you think 280 is a lot of work....DO NOT take EECS427.
Just the hardest class I've taken thus far. I'm certain bigger challenges are ahead
Diff Eq was rough, but I did pretty well. Electronics Circ Analysis is why I am a business major though :)
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Don't expect many MCDB/genetics majors here but this class was brutal. Specific mechanisms of cytoskeleton, cell-matrix motility, and specific cell-matrix interactions, etc. Remember the exams were basically blank pages where you had to draw the process out for certain situations. As someone who had already been accepted in the graduate health sciences and just trying to finish their degree it was awful.
This doesn't exist anymore and I don't think it was super difficult. But in the context of it being an intro class, it was. Four semesters of calc was a prereq. I got permission to take it simultaneously with Math 216. That wasn't really doing me a favor.
Probably not the case for everyone, but my hardest class was entry level calculus my freshman year. I was not anything close to a math major, but thought it would be easy enough to knock out my math credit requirement for LSA. Yeah, not so much. Of course it didn't help that the instructor's Eastern European accent was so thick I could only understand every fifth word.
I got a 27% on the final and it was the highest score in the class!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
that class was.
Wow, that is a sure sign that a professor hates everyone.
Theory of probabily by Mulinath Banerjee (probably spelling his name wrong) - was nothing but proofs but tests were at least open book.
I had no clue what I was doing and literally copied different proofs from the book that looked close to the question hoping for partial credit. It worked, got a 30ish% that was curved to a B+
Calc 4 gave me FITS. I did well in Calc 2 (B+) and really enjoyed Calc 3 (B), but Calc 4 was a STRUGGLE and a half for me. Just didn't resonate with me very well at all. EECS 281 was of course tough, but enjoyable.
EECS 376 proved to me that I was never going to go to grad school for Computer Science. Just a whole lot of nope going on with that class. Felt bad for the professor, too, since everyone disliked him. I think I still pulled off a B, but didn't know what the hell was going on the last third of that class.
I took a Shakespeare course where we had to read a full play each week - that was a grind. The textbook contained Shakespeare's complete works and was huge. Lugging that thing around was annoying.