As a French major, I had to take and pass a year of Latin. I loathed it.

It was strange, since I'd really enjoyed it in high school...

I just barely made it. Got D minus grades both semesters. I suspect the prof took pity on both of us, and passed me so he wouldn't have to endure me for another year!

until I found that translation hidden in the corner of the main library.

As a college freshman I had the idea I might like to be a journalist. My counselor recommend the style 101 and warned it was a filter to sort out pretenders.

We started in a big lecture hall and in the second week we moved to a medium sized classroom. In the third week we were in a small room with about 25 people and that was where I bailed out.

I bet the people who passed that class could spot 20 errors in spelling, grammar and syntax just in this one post.

I had to take two semesters for my lab science requirement in anthropology. For some reason the head of the department taught it and used it as his gut class to weed out geology majors.

8am lectures my freshman year, weekend field trips while hungover in the back of smelly diesel buses, exciting labs of mineral identification...

The exams consisted of a mid-term and a final. Each one covered about six hundred pages of material and consisted of three essay questions. Answer two of the three.

Thank God my best friend and room mate was a geology major!

I love Geology. Sadly, we don't have much geology in the Fargo area, you have to go to the Badlands if you are into fossils or to the Iron Range if you are into Precambrian geology.

But rarely fun. North Dakota is the only one of the lower 48 States I haven't visited. Give me a reason!

I have been to the Badlands NP, though...

Followed closely by Micro Economics. Boy, did I hate those classes.

Good luck! BTW, 30 years later I still have dreams that I need 9 credits to graduate. You have to wonder what hidden part of your brain that comes from, cause I made it through with a few credits to spare.

I was in the Linguistics Department with a concentration in Japanese, and my adviser, who hadn't been on the job market since the 1950s and rarely had graduate students, told me that I had to minor in Chinese in order to get a job. (This is not the case, and wasn't even back then.)

I actually enjoyed learning modern Chinese, and it came in handy when I visited Taiwan and China years later (I learned to speak up to a tourist level), but after I'd had 1 years of semi-intensive (9 hours a week) modern Chinese, my adviser said, "Enough of that modern Chinese. You have to take classical."

Normally, students take Classical Chinese after two or three years of modern, but I was tossed in there with a bunch of undergraduates and graduate students who were majoring in Chinese, with a few native speakers thrown in for good measure.

Modern Chinese grammar is actually pretty easy and straightforward. Classical Chinese looks like a random list of words strung together. I told my friends, "It's the world's only completely ambiguous language."

I spent hours on it every day and still completely blanked out on the first semester final. I didn't even remember the characters I knew from Japanese. (One upside to that experience: when I started teaching, I knew students weren't lying when they came to me in tears and said they'd blanked out on a test.)

After that debacle, my adviser and the Chinese linguistics professor conferred and decided that I could just audit the second semester. It was a major relief. But Chinese historical phonology and dialectology still lay ahead of me.

As I mentioned before, the modern Chinese has come in handy during my travels. Not only was Classical Chinese an ordeal but I've never used it.

Mine was in my undergraduate. I did like reading the Dao De Jing in the original though. The good thing about Classical Chinese is that it helps you figure out the origin of modern usage.

organic chemistry is one of them.

oddly enough, reading the book "On Food And Cooking" by Harold McGee, he's got a section in the back on chemistry, including organic. While I still don't understand it well enough to make use of it, I have a better idea of what's going on in the world of organics, thanks to his lucid explanations. Plus, organic molecules come with 2 and 3D pictures!

... and some days I cut classes to do just that. But I learned the hard way I couldn't skip a single day studying o-chem.

The first time I failed a class in college it was for fighting with the teaching assistant; I later passed that class with an "A."

Organic chemistry was the second class I flunked because it was easier and more rewarding to load trucks. But even with my full and complete attention organic chemistry was still difficult.

Okay, maybe not the most difficult class ever...

I took one class from a world renowned biologist (I won't name) and people warned me against it, saying he rarely gave a grade higher than a "C." The GPA obsessed pre-med students were especially adament. I ought to have been worried the first day when I counted only thirteen of us in his class. He was a very entertaining lecturerer, he'd take us into his lab to show us stuff, he'd invite us to his house, but he also expected everyone to work at his level, and he was intense. I worked harder for the C+ he gave me than any "A" I ever got.

or high-voltage electricity transmission,

or "Business Statistics"


Calculus killed me (F) and I wasn't much better at chemistry. So, I changed to something I understood: drafting

But I had that particular course in french on top of everything. I am fluent in French but it's not my first language. I wasn't good at calculus to begin with but to try to follow it while it was taught in french was near impossible, but I passed with a C+. I wasn't the only one - I'm sure we were graded on a curve because there was one test I got 30%, but everyone else did too, lol.

So far, this go-round, everything including business stats (first one only) and econ 101 weren't too bad. I even found corporate finance pretty easy despite the weirdest equations ever. My accounting courses are causing me lots of grief, not looking forward to the advanced courses next term.

By the way - the reason I found stats ok is because I had a great instructor. Some of my friends had another instructor and really struggled. I think it's just one of those courses where the instructor makes all the difference. I can't even imagine trying to do it online - is there some way you can find a tutor or something?

Often, it's taught by people who don't have a stats background.

I was once asked to help a friend of a friend who was having troubles with the rank sum test (the simplest test there is). I asked to see the notes she had taken in class. I couldn't make head or tail of what she had written. The lecturer had taken something really simple and turned it into something mind numbingly complicated. (I knew it wasn't the student - I knew her quite well - and I'd seen similar abominations in other students' books).

Genetics -- I was completely lost after Gregor Mendel's peas. I managed to pass because it was a "herd" class of about 500 people that was graded on a curve. Might as well have been teaching the class in Russian or Swahili as far as a I was concerned, because I understood nothing that was being taught, for all intents and purposes. I got a 2.0, so at least some of the people in the class were dumber than I was.

Accounting -- actually worse in terms of the way the course was taught, although the subject matter was somewhat, slightly, more understandable. The "lectures" were all on video tape, another "herd" class of hundreds of people. Then, we were assigned to graduate student TA's to work with -- the guy I was assigned to was from China and I couldn't understand a word he said, his English language skills were terrible. Add to that an accountants penchant to arbitrarily (from a math viewpoint) randomly change numbers from positive to negative, and it was an equation for frustration.

Michigan State, gotta love it. Great school for parties. Terrible school for academics.

look out for those rogue retrotransposons!

got straight As until I took this damn class.....professor took pity on me and gave me a B for trying my darndest

That course ate me alive.

was one that was so esoteric, I couldn't even figure out what it was about from the name

Traditionally 600-level physics courses were supposed to be for PhD candidates in specialties other than the course topic. The new guy hadn't received the memo. I was looking forward to an intro to string theory (or M theory or whatever they wanted to call it that week) and the first lecture didn't seem bad. But he had some homework problems posted online as a "warmup." It wasn't that I couldn't solve any of them. That wouldn't have made me drop the course immediately.

What did make me drop it was that I could not figure out what any of them were even asking.

In addition to our text book, we also had to read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". Once I figured out that parroting Rand's ridiculous theories as the only true way was I able to eke out a B. Seriously, what a bunch of horseshit. Every fiber of my being knew the instructor was a deluded and wrong.

Linguistics was more work and quite difficult but more fun overall. Calc II was painful, and I barely made it through there sane.

I can't decide which was more difficult. I think a different teacher would have made a difference with the Calculus. Part of the reason the first semester of Physics was so rough was that there were a lot of formulas to memorize. I'm not good at that.

kicked my butt

had to take the class before being allowed to do my research project

It was all about probability, which I could never get my head around. Either something happens or it doesn't.
I failed it and got a "D" on the second try, forcing me to take Astronomy during the summer, which was a glorious, infinitely fascinating course. I even soaked up the math with comprehension that surprised me and I got an "A".

My college had requirements for at least 3 semesters in each field--humanities, social sciences and
natural sciences. Astronomy 101 used to be a joke of a course where everyone passed, and easily
satisfied one of their 3 natural science semesters. The department head got fed up with this the
year before I took it (and no one told me), and took over 101 himself. I felt like I had been asked
to design, build, calculate trajectories for and pilot the Starship Enterprise. He made sure about a
third of the class failed it, and he was pretty close to successful in his endeavors.

didn't understand it in high school, didn't understand it in college.

i might have done better in physics had i gotten through my college algebra class first. that shit stumped me in high school, but i crushed it in college.

It made me change my major from Biotech to Psych, LMAO!

I know it sounds stupid that it would be hard, since it's French I. But he professor is a much older French woman. She hardly understands us when we ask questions and will either (I kid you not) smile and turn away or give a totally unrelated answer. She also moves way too fast. There's usually three classes in between tests, and a test is of course a full chapter. I'm still trying to learn material from one chapter when we're taking the test for the following chapter.

to help you over the tough parts. Someone in second-year or third-year French would be ideal. I'm not suggesting a native speaker, because a native speaker is not necessarily the best teacher if they can't explain the language in terms that are meaningful to you.

who normally taught masters level classes and was inserted into biology II due to cut backs. His first day of class he told us that he didn't know how to teach us since to him it was like trying to teach kindergartners higher lever classes. It was the most convoluted class I have ever taken. I'd rather take Bio Chem IV ten times then ever do that class again.

It was hard. But as it turned out, it was the Prof who made it hard. A test every Friday. 5 points for spelling your name correctly. He graded on the curve. 10% flunked. The trick was to score just above the cut-off. I got a D. I couldn't even do Ohm's Law. Kirchhoff? Forget it! For years I avoided electrical problems. When I started teaching I discovered that it isn't that difficult.

I started in engineering and the EE prof I had was one of my worst ever. A EE major told me that the worst teachers at our school were in EE, and they assigned the worst of them to the course for non-EE students (the one I was in). In that class I received the single least helpful bit of feedback on one homework assignment... the single word, "Mistakes!" in the margin. Uh yeah, thanks, that really set me on the right path there...

it was just one guy. It was a very small school. I think he knew a lot. He just wasn't good at getting that knowledge to everybody in the class.

but the most difficult class I ever had in high school was algebra. Never understood the whole concept, butt somehow I passed it with a C.

Evening class, 7-9 pm. Way over my head. I dropped it after a few weeks.

Covered so much material I could barely keep up.

EDIT - Cognitive psychology - honorable mention.

I was used to classes being intellectually demanding, but physically demanding was another story. Half the class dropped out; it was just too painful.

That's what happens when you let your girlfriend talk you into taking a class.

The hell of it is, I actually did learn a lot -- but on a delayed-reaction basis.

The professor was completely incomprehensible. He blathered on and on about who-knows-what and ignored the textbook. I got a D, first semester freshman.
I got a B the second semester, with a different professor.

Probably the same class just different name...

I got a C, the worst grade I earned when I went back to school after flunking out during my drinking and drug days...

But Algebra, geometry, trig, <<<shuder>>>. Y'all may not believe this but I got all the way through an MA program without any math.

I had to work hard to make Bs in Mechanics (it was two semesters) but I got a D in Adv. Calc. It was harder than Ordinary Differential Equations. Chemistry was beyond me and hurt me in Petrology.

I did better in "more advanced" courses, but Calc II was a war I survived with a C+ thanks to a late rally. There were just certain integration techniques that never really "clicked" for me. Fortunately I'd already learned in high school the one I've actually needed over the years (integration by parts).

I took a lot of classes one would generally consider harder, but that's the one that gave me fits.

Edited to add: Actually, upon further review I think my Continental Philosophy class was harder for me, in part because it was so different from all the other courses in the major (the department had a strong orientation toward English-language analytic philosophy). I did get an A in the course, but making sense of the books was a serious slog.

econometrics. So in some maths I do really well. But the vectors I could not compute.

Then . . . boom, the love was over.

who couldn't teach her way out of a paper bag!

I got a B but I think it left me with PTSD.

I flunked both of those classes and changed my AA degree program from Medical Laboratory Technician to Business Technology.

I went into this class thinking it would be easy, but instead what I got was the right wing's perception of an elitist professor who was as out of touch as Mitt Romney. We watched a video on Land's End and he said "before viewing this, I had never heard of this company."

His experience was in (very) high end fashion and I was clearly the peon of the class and treated as such (there were 10 people in the class). We did one exercise in class about how much we would pay for a pair of jeans, and I was the only person in the class who would not pay 3 figures for them.

Our final assignment was to open an imaginary store. I chose a pet store and was clearly out of place, as everyone else chose high-end designer custom clothing shops.

ETA one of my classmates in that class had a claim to fame--- she was the person who hit (and killed) Bill Clinton's dog with her car.

The book was a graduate-level text ($80 25 years ago) and all the "professor" did was write formulas on the board. He couldn't explain how they applied to anything. He just wrote them over and over again. If you went to his office for help, he would do the same. He was the only thing standing between me and a third major (I got two in four years). Everyone dropped the class. The material wasn't difficult, but his handling of it was. The entire first part of the class was about field theory. The first question on the mid-term test ended with "not necessarily a field". The highest score on the test was 62. I checked in at 48. That's fucked.

First time I ever got a 'C' in math.

I have a natural talent for languages (French, German, Latin, Greek, Spanish, e.g.). But Hebrew ... letters look totally alien, no vowels, you read right to left and start at the back of the book ...

THAT was difficult!!

Bake

Not because of the subject matter, but the way the professor taught it. i never worked so hard for a B- The 19 year olds very much resented being comeplled to study in order to pass a class.

College Algebra I... I took it twice in Community College but got a D both times, not enough to transfer to a regular college, so I had to take it again. This time, I barely managed to get a C-.

Yeah, I really suck at math.

In accounting the instructors taught theory and gave exams in usage. And in Finance the instructor JUST got his Doctoral, and made us perform the equations that our DAMN calculators, we HAD to purchase for the class, ACTUALLY computed!!!!
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!

But I'm well over it now!

My finance instructor did that. She'd spent 20 minutes working on 1 question in front of the class, step after step of the darn equation. Then after we spent all that time trying to keep up with her, and understand what the hell she was doing, she'd say, "Or you can just do this, this and this on your business calculator." ARGH! But at least we were allowed the calculator during the final. It saved me loads of time.

It was unreal. Made an A-, though.

As a music major, no matter your specialization, you had to take two years performance on your instrument. I was a composition major, and really couldn't play my instrument for shit. I was basically given a "gentleman's C" both years. Luckily, the class was only graded once a year, not every quarter, so it wasn't too much of a drag on my GPA. The worst part was having to perform in a public practicum once a year; what a nightmare that was.

Differential Equations. Still wakes me up with night terrors.

i was a math major, but I was lost from day one. I remember looking around the room thinking, youre telling me all these people know what this guy is talking about?

so hard, but the prof. It was an American Literature class. He was a failed writer and took out his frustration on everyone. He was what you may call a "prick".

I failed the final. Had to take it again...

One of these...



It's not that backing is ultra-difficult...unless you got taught by the asshole they had teaching it at the school I went to. He was hired because he had driven a truck 42 years. He was a yard teacher because he no longer qualified for a CDL, so he couldn't go out on the road. And the only back this guy taught was the 90-degree back...NO ONE in the world will do a 90 degree back in a semi because it's almost impossible to do it without pulling forward seven or eight times.

I spent two weeks unsuccessfully trying to learn to back from this guy (fortunately, they don't ask you to back on the Texas road test) and an owner-operator at my company's Ohio yard taught me how to do it well in twenty minutes.

Last edited Wed Apr 25, 2012, 03:15 PM - Edit history (1)

But the more tough it got, the more determined I got. I passed it with a 99.85% grade, and shattered the Humber College's record. Probably still stands today, among the awards that I won too. The Irony is that I'm now unemployed and can't find work in the local biomedical field.

Intro to or some such, from the guy who wrote the text book. The guy was ridiculously smart, but he couldn't teach worth a darn. This class was for people who did not know how to program. Suppossedly. First assignment - go write a program that will generate your social security number (or something like that). Huh? Dropped it after 3 classes amidst dire warnings that if I didn't know how to program I would be unemployable. Thank god for the soon-to-be-invented software.

Since I was in Anthro I got in; otherwise it was pretty much all ladies.

Guys, have you ever been in a room with 300 ladies talking graphically about sex for 2 hours 32 times a semester?

God, that was hell. We were randomly assigned to groups of 4 students to team together (online, ugh). All the math teachers were clumped into one group and I guess understood everything. The rest of us all understood nothing.

Then the online teacher abandoned us - just dropped off the face of the world. My husband the engineer coached me over coffee and baileys. The baileys industry in Michigan spiked that year, I'm sure. I ended up doing every last math problem for our group because nobody else would. Another guy wrote all the papers. The last two people in our group did absolutely no work and I hope they failed! It didn't matter that I did all the math, I couldn't do any of those problems now if you paid me.

A new teacher appeared a few weeks after the disappearance of our original one, but he couldn't help us much. He spent most of the final weeks trying to figure out how the hell to grade us because the missing teacher didn't leave any grades for him. He was just as stressed as the rest of us.

I majored in history.

Music major, junior year, 1 class, 2 semesters, 3 hours a week for 2 hours credit a semester. The teacher was a Humanities professor (Ph.D.) who taught this class as his "hobby." One of our finals had three essay questions, one of which was, "Trace the history of music THOROUGHLY from the beginning of time to present day. Use dates, places, composers, and composition titles." We had 90 minutes to answer 3 questions.

The entire class was music majors except for one guy who was an engineering major--he got the only A in the class both semesters.

No, Im not joking. We had to memorize over 100 local birds by their call, what they eat and their feathers. Tests were incredibly challenging to say the least.

Jesus.

The program (Final Cut Pro) was so hard to learn.