Your Hardest Undergraduate Course

[Choppy]

For me just about every class was a challenge in its own way. I took a general relativity course in my third year that I wasn't ready for and it was probably the toughest slog.

 

[soothsayer]

I actually thought my upper-div Classical Mechanics class was the most difficult I took. The professor was a hard *** and was rarely helpful. Material moved along at a furious pace, and we had weekly quizzes that were a substantial part of the grade that consisted of two or three problems that were difficult to solve in time; if you didn't read and study that week, you were surely screwed. On top of that, we got more homework in that class than any other.

Math methods for Physics was a close second, to be sure. Three quarters of increasingly rigorous mathematical Hell. Not fun times, but I went into it feeling like I wasn't as good at math as most of my classmates, and came out feeling like an accomplished mathematician/physicist.

 

[WannabeNewton]

I took a general relativity course in my third year that I wasn't ready for and it was probably the toughest slog.

I'll be taking a proper GR course next semester so it should be fun to see how that plays out

 

[micromass]

I'll be taking a proper GR course next semester so it should be fun to see how that plays out

If it doesn't use Wald you're probably going to fail the class.

 

[WannabeNewton]

If it doesn't use Wald you're probably going to fail the class.

I'll just have to convince the professor that whatever text he/she intends to use is unequivocally inferior to Wald's text xP, but as of now it does use Wald's text so yay!

 

[micromass]

I'll just have to convince the professor that whatever text he/she intends to use is unequivocally inferior to Wald's text xP

Even if they use Malament?

 

[WannabeNewton]

Even if they use Malament?

Lol it's a physics class not a philosophy class.

 

[micromass]

Lol it's a physics class not a philosophy class.

Oh, so it's rather easy then. Gotcha.

 

[soothsayer]

Hartle makes a great GR text too. I used it in my undergrad GR course, and I aced the course.

...and I NEVER aced physics courses XD

 

[eumyang]

I would have to say my hardest math course was the first abstract algebra. Man i worked really hard in that class. Fortunately i had one of those moments where it all clicked when i took the second abstract algebra and the first week was a review of the topics in algebra 1.

This describes me, more or less. I remember taking Abstract Algebra 1 and I totally bombed the 1st test (57/100 I think). The prof. was my academic advisor, so I begged him to retake the test, giving some excuse. I'm not proud of doing that, but he did allow me to retake; I don't remember what I got, but I think I passed. That was my wake-up call; from then on I visited the prof. during office hours and worked my butt off. It paid off; I got a 91/100 on the 2nd test. I think I ended up with a B overall in that class.

Many people agree that the hardest course was analysis.
(snip)
In comparison, everything else was easy, except philosophy, which was such BS it was hard to figure out what they wanted to hear.

Interesting enough, I had less trouble with Analysis than Abstract Algebra. And I loved philosophy - at my undergrad two lower-division courses and a course in Ethics were part of our Gen-Ed.

 

[WannabeNewton]

Hartle makes a great GR text too. I used it in my undergrad GR course, and I aced the course.

Oh I was talking about grad GR, not undergrad. My adviser told me I would be bored to death if I took undergrad GR.

 

[soothsayer]

Oh I was talking about grad GR, not undergrad. My adviser told me I would be bored to death if I took undergrad GR.

Oh! Yes, my undergrad GR course was not super difficult, but it certainly wasn't boring! The subject was obviously awesome, and I liked that I got to learn a lot of new math. I remember some of the material actually being pretty hellish.

 

[WannabeNewton]

Oh! Yes, my undergrad GR course was not super difficult, but it certainly wasn't boring! The subject was obviously awesome, and I liked that I got to learn a lot of new math. I remember some of the material actually being pretty hellish.

Yeah I'm sure the class itself is awesome but I meant that my adviser thought it would be boring for me personally, not that the class itself was boring in nature. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

 

[soothsayer]

Yeah I'm sure the class itself is awesome but I meant that my adviser thought it would be boring for me personally, not that the class itself was boring in nature. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

No worries!

 

[TomServo]

Honors quantum, though it was a lot harder than it should have been due to family issues at home.

There is also the class where we made one level of a 2D platformer, building the game engine and everything from scratch using XNA and C#. It was brutal because of the workload and time constraints, but it made me ten times a better programmer than I was before.

 

[deskswirl]

Engineering:

Linear Control Systems . . . probably due to the hard a** of a professor that we had literally 700+ pages of hell and 35hr+/week homework assignments...the final took nine hours IN CLASS.

Physics:

UG Math Methods . . . Confluent Hypergeometric, Mathieu, Elliptic blah blah ..the only thing I found interesting in this class was Green's Functions and Calculus of Variations. Seriously probably lost years of of my life staying up to do the homework. A friend of mine taking the class told me it was his first B (EVER!). I was just glad to be finished.

Note: The above combinations of courses should not be attempted at the same time.

 

[DimReg]

Probably the hardest undergraduate class I took was the freshmen E+M. Not that it was objectively hard, but it was the first time I really applied integral calculus to physics, so it was very "mind expanding". It was also the first time that many problems had (at least in principle) multiple solutions given the course material. Also, the teacher had very high expectations.

Honestly though, after that "hard" never really seemed like an appropriate description of coursework. It always seemed like the dominant limiting factor was my work ethic.

 

[wotanub]

Statistical Mechanics as an undergrad. I got an A but I don't even know what I learned. All I could manage was to plug and chug because I didn't get the point of the physics.

 

[jasonRF]

A history course I took first semester freshman year on turn of the century Europe. Had to buy 10 books for the course, by such easy reading authors as Nietzche and Durkheim and Freud and ... well, you get the picture. every couple of weeks had to produce a paper criticizing what we read. I was WAAAY out of my depth, but it did teach me something about writing.

jason

 

[Metta]

That sounds brutal. Is that the norm for all linear control classes or was it the professor?

Engineering:

Linear Control Systems . . . probably due to the hard a** of a professor that we had literally 700+ pages of hell and 35hr+/week homework assignments...the final took nine hours IN CLASS.

Physics:

UG Math Methods . . . Confluent Hypergeometric, Mathieu, Elliptic blah blah ..the only thing I found interesting in this class was Green's Functions and Calculus of Variations. Seriously probably lost years of of my life staying up to do the homework. A friend of mine taking the class told me it was his first B (EVER!). I was just glad to be finished.

Note: The above combinations of courses should not be attempted at the same time.

 

[eumyang]

This thread reminds me of something else I've read:

It's been claimed that Math 55 at Harvard is the most difficult math undergraduate class in the country (link)

I've also read somewhere that the difficulty of MATH 20700-20800-20900 (Honors Analysis in Rn I-II-III) at the University of Chicago is close to, or on par with, Math 55.

 

[WannabeNewton]

I would personally say more so with regards to UChicago's honors analysis (mainly because of the pace).

 

[lurflurf]

This thread reminds me of something else I've read:

It's been claimed that Math 55 at Harvard is the most difficult math undergraduate class in the country (link)

I've also read somewhere that the difficulty of MATH 20700-20800-20900 (Honors Analysis in Rn I-II-III) at the University of Chicago is close to, or on par with, Math 55.

Math 55 is intended for freshman and MATH 20700-20800-20900 is intended for sophomores so it is an unfair comparison.

 

[atyy]

Discrete maths was hardest for me. I wanted to learn about how CDs work and so thought Reed-Solomon coding would be interesting. Till this day I have no idea how anyone could think of such things.

The other thing which still gets me every time is why the wheel's relative velocity is zero in rolling without slipping.

 

[DimReg]

Math 55 is intended for freshman and MATH 20700-20800-20900 is intended for sophomores so it is an unfair comparison.

Not quite true: About 50% of Honors Analysis students are freshman. It is entirely intended to be a freshman course, however the understanding is that the students knowledge far exceeds the typical freshman.

 

[TomServo]

Math 55 is for students who started calculus in their early teens and went to high schools where they had taken linear algebra and diffy qs and maybe discrete math already. At my high school I think calc was the highest math class. It was only 600 students and most of them were urban rednecks, so even having calc was kind of a joke at that school.

 

[deskswirl]

That sounds brutal. Is that the norm for all linear control classes or was it the professor?

Mainly just the professor. Asked him if we would be needing a second textbook halfway through the course and he just laughed. I think he was trying to fit two semesters of material in one - because that's "how it was" when he took the course 40 years ago.

BTW, Basically for our midterm we were to model the Rossler system (3 coupled nonlinear DEs) and given absolutely no directions on what was expected. In his words, "I just want to see how far you can get."