Current Events > In your opinion what is the most difficult major, undergrad course?

(+) Yeah! (+)

i mean that a lot of undergrads usually take? that you have experience with ....etc....Iirc stuff like organic chemistry and calc 2 are famously usually brought up

business.

Aside from STEM other than biology, I'd say Philosophy.

in Calculus 3 when they do sequences and series

also theory of computation, when they do recurrence relations

The hardest college class I took in 4 years was honors ethics & diversity in business because the professor was exactly what you're imagining from that title and assigned more reading than the rest of my classes combined as the *baseline* to participate in the course, on top of a semester long group project and an individual final. It wasn't necessarily that the material was challenging but that her standards were not realistic to meet.

I took Calc 2 in high school I mostly remember it being limits and convergent/divergent series.

Trigonometry is genuinely harder because it's rote memorization of a ton of formulas and nonsense terms like sine/cos/tan/sec. Chances are your teacher will not be competent enough to actually explain what these terms mean or why they're actually valuable, you'll just get some "soak a toe" mnemonic about which has x over y or y over x.

The way trigonometry presented is actually like hieroglyphics. For Calculus, I think the teacher is more likely to be forced to actually teach you the intuition of what is going on. But i guess if not then it'd be hell too

I dont think there has to be a "hard" math class at the level of calculus and below, a lot of instructors are just bad at instructing and reinforce a culture of believing math requires a "math gene" or something in your brain to comprehend when it's just logic.

Also, if you take a creative writing class you have to get your story workshopped in front of all your peers and a genius professor writer so that's really hard.

Organic chemistry kicked me in the nuts. The thing about it is not that it is particularly difficult (it is), it's that all the prereqs that you think would help you going into it don't prepare you for it at all.

It's really bizarre in that it really should be one of the first classes you should take for most biological science, because if there was ever a class to make you question whether you should be pursuing said major, it'd be o chem and it's better for everyone involved if you learn that when you're starting the program and not when you're two years into it.

Doe posted...

The hardest college class I took in 4 years was honors ethics & diversity in business because the professor was exactly what you're imagining from that title and assigned more reading than the rest of my classes combined as the *baseline* to participate in the course, on top of a semester long group project and an individual final

I took Calc 2 in high school I mostly remember it being limits and convergent/divergent series.

Trigonometry is genuinely harder because it's rote memorization of a ton of formulas and nonsense terms like sine/cos/tan/sec. Chances are your teacher will not be competent enough to actually explain what these terms mean or why they're actually valuable, you'll just get some "soak a toe" mnemonic about which has x over y or y over x.

The way trigonometry presented is actually like hieroglyphics. For Calculus, I think the teacher is more likely to be forced to actually teach you the intuition of what is going on. But i guess if not then it'd be hell too

I dont think there has to be a "hard" math class at the level of calculus and below, a lot of instructors are just bad at instructing and reinforce a culture of believing math requires a "math gene" or something in your brain to comprehend when it's just logic.

yeah i agree good pts. alot of those college math instructors are terrible, a lot don't speak english very well either, like you said. what do you mean trig is a lot like heiroglyphics?

Hospy posted...

Organic chemistry kicked me in the nuts. The thing about it is not that it is particularly difficult (it is), it's that all the prereqs that you think would help you going into it don't prepare you for it at all.

It's really bizarre in that it really should be one of the first classes you should take for most biological science, because if there was ever a class to make you question whether you should be pursuing said major, it'd be o chem and it's better for everyone involved if you learn that when you're starting the program and not when you're two years into it.

yeah that class is a famous , weeder course. What do dudes even think of the idea of weeder courses?

GranTurismo posted...

yeah that class is a famous , weeder course. What do dudes even think of the idea of weeder courses?

I'm fine with it if the weeder courses are also the introductory courses. Nobody wants to spend two years studying a major only to figure out that actually you're an idiot and you just wasted two years of your life.

GranTurismo posted...

lot don't speak english very well either

This happened to me with statistics unfortunately

GranTurismo posted...

what do you mean trig is a lot like heiroglyphics?

Well basically I assume that sine, cosine etc can be pretty effectively be derived on a whiteboard, as well as formulas for the properties of 3d objects like spheres, but this was not how the class was taught to me. Rather, the surface area of a sphere or the volume of a cylinder is determined by a secret knowledge formula your teacher is throwing at you and you just need to accept it and memorize it. The cosine graph just does that, it's just (0,1) (1,0) hope you remember.

I never did as poorly in a class in high school as trig and clearly I'm still a little bitter lol.

bumpi

Not necessarily the most difficult, but statistically the course that trips up the most students is College Algebra. Many undergrads don't take this course, having met the requirement in high school. But for those who have to take it, it is notoriously difficult, probably because anyone who hasn't taken math beyond algebra in high school has not had good experiences with math in general.

last bump

In my major it was chemical process engineering. A weeder course in your last year. Absolutely brutal

The mechanical engineers had it easy, they had their weeder course in the first year. Engineering mechanics 1&2

Yeah O-Chem was the worst year of my life. So, so, SO glad I never have to study that shit ever again.

Verdekal posted...

Aside from STEM other than biology, I'd say Philosophy.

Philosophy isn't so difficult until the third year. I found Law and Linguistics much harder.

nexigrams posted...

Yeah O-Chem was the worst year of my life. So, so, SO glad I never have to study that shit ever again.

what exactly is so difficult about o chem? hear it is like the most difficult course ever

I took a Technical Writing class, it was that or a Public Speaking class that was required for my degree. We had to write a semester-long paper, it was one of the few things graded in the class, and it was the midterm and the final. For the midterm, my paper received somewhere around a 10... out of 100. And we were supposed to keep working on that paper to present it for the final. I blocked the rest of that class out of my memory, I can't remember if I dropped it or not, but that was super heartbreaking.

The 2nd biology class I had to take in community college.... I think it was biology 104. That class required a lot of time and effort.

CedarPointcp posted...

what exactly is so difficult about o chem? hear it is like the most difficult course ever

last bump

O, wouldn't you like to know.