The hardest class you've ever taken.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Oddly enough, Music Theory. I started playing musical instruments at 6 years old (pennywhistle and cut-down banjo at first, then guitar, mandolin, bodhran and pipes). I had never written original music but by the time I got to uni, I'd done more arrangements of traditional songs than most people have had hot dinners. Thus, I figured Music Theory would be a snoozer, and I'd walk away with good marks without actually doing much.

Dropping that class was the wisest decision I'd made since, at 14, I declined to wrestle a medium-sized boar.

Boru

[thesummerqueen]

Hardest subject for me is high maths, like I said, but the hardest class for me to get through was a 'bug' course in college. Not because it wasn't interesting, but because the teacher was shitty and we didn't really learn anything practical. There were only a couple nights spent outside in the greenhouses and gardens looking at pests in their native environment. He also expected us night students to somehow make time outside of a full day's work and classes most or all evenings to go "bug collecting". I tried several times on the weekends to find all the different kinds he wanted me to find, but ended up only finding a bunch of the same (thus not filling the requirement). Then he got confused when I said I worked in an industrial plant so there was no way for me to "wander around the work landscape" as he suggested looking for others. Basically he was not equipped to teach the class he was supposed to be teaching (a practical garden pest course to night-school students). He would make a powerpoint, hand us copies of the powerpoint exactly as it was projected, then just read the powerpoint out loud. The only time we learned something new was when a student asked a question, and even then he frequently just repeated information. It was such a waste of time, energy, and money.

[Psykhronic]

Probably structural geology, specifically the labs. Those labs, man... holy shit. Although I did boss those strain ellipses, the rest of the material was quite hard. Of course, taking petrology at the same time was more than likely a poor decision. It was a weird time for me too, usually I kick ASS at labs, but the way structure labs were set up was not ideal for how I learn. Too much noise, not enough clear instruction. I respect the shit out of that professor to this day though.

[Clueless Morgan]

I change my mind. Pre-calc was harder than Structures.

Oddly enough, Music Theory.

What's hard about music theory? It seems like would be so easy...

[SteelCurtain]

My DBF (Design-Build-Fly) course, while very fun, was absolutely draining. The entire grad level class was to design a 1:16 scale RC airplane from scratch, build it, and fly it. But the lab work was excruciating. My prof was crazy strict. We had to create our own simulator in MATLAB, model our aircraft in it, and then show our results in the wind tunnel, hopefully matching our model. He would take off points for anything. (His favorite was the grammatical error "the data was" rather than the correct "the data were"). Five 40 page lab reports in the semester. Lots of Red Bull and late nights.

[pocaracas]

It's not the classes... it's the teachers.

[Jackalope]

It's not the classes... it's the teachers.

^^^ This ^^^

My most maddening class was Digital Logic & Theory. The class was maddening not because the material was hard (it wasn't), but because the professor was incompetent - it was as if he was learning the material two paragraphs ahead of class.

I already knew the material, and he made so many mistakes during his lectures that the rest of the class struggled through the lab work during both units. Aced the exams, aced the labs, earned a B because I declined to attend his useless lectures after the second week of the first unit.

[Assimilate]

Calc classes.

[Rev. Rye]

I think the most difficult class I ever took was Women's Literature, mainly because the teacher was really old, likely slipping into dementia, and much of the class consisted of reading Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse aloud, at one point, re-reading the same three chapters four weeks in a row. This was not helped by the fact that her hearing was so bad that we had to repeatedly calibrate our speed and volume, and it reached the point where any reading loud and slow enough for her to understand it was loud and slow enough for her to take it as making fun of her. I actually remember starting up a thread here to see if I should drop the class or not. Eventually, I kept the class and wound up getting a C-minus, the lowest grade I've got since my junior year of high school.

[MJ the Skeptical]

Physics and Calculus. One I liked, one I hated.