What was the hardest course in your major?

griffiths is outrageously archaic
i got my only C all throughout fucking undergrad in electromagnetism because of that medieval bullshit, on top of some family/housing issues.

Automata theory and computability. I was an A/B student and I barely passed that shit, jesus christ never again. Shit was interesting though.

For computing science most people will say algorithms/logic courses as "make or break". If you work hard in those courses you'll do well, but normies definitely get roasted.

CS here, senior.

I'd say so far, CALC II (any other calc is ez), Physics II, or Probability theory.

CS courses have always been fine

what? formal languages and automata was the single greatest class I ever took.

the sets man.

>3 hardest
Honors Real Analysis
Honors Abstract Algebra
Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics

>3 easiest
Theory of Computation
Algorithm Analysis
Artificial Intelligence

math student here.

analysis has a bad rep

>mfw all the game dev wannabes couldn't get their head around the pumping lemma and herbrand structures

>thermodynamics
That shit is all messed up and need a new approach

Thus why I said it was interesting.

>game dev wannabes taking such a class

bio
>biochem

geo
>physical geology

Because most people taking engineering are fucking retards, and a good majority of them only picked it because it 'pays well xd'

Organic chemistry I was my hardest course, I dropped the class the first time because there was no way for me to pass, passed with a D the second time but had to retake it because you need a C or better to take O. Chem II. Passed with a C the third time, no other class required that many tries. O. Chem II was significantly easier for me, once I had a good grasp on it and knew how to study. I still barely passed with a C. It was difficult, but I loved the labs and usually made A's in those.

That class is also usually claimed to be the hardest. Microbiology major here, though Calculus, and Anatomy are also supposed to be difficult. I never took anatomy, and Immunology was hard but I think it's only because we had a shitty teacher. I also had shitty O. Chem teachers the first two times and I think that made a big difference.

Also zoology was pretty insane because of the sheer amount of memorization involved. You're required to memorize a lot of different phyla and their relation to each other, as well as characteristics. Again, I'm glad I did it because I wouldn't be a good biologist/aka/stampcollector without it. But it wasn't required for my major and really strained by ability to memorize things. I know everyone here shits on that but it's a cool parlor trick to be able to recite an organism's species name or the phyla it belongs to. You immediately look really smart even though it's pretty simple shit anyone could look up if they tried.

Analytical Chemistry/Quantitative Analysis
Shit professor who contradicted the textbook and usually had to backtrack every other day because he realized he taught a crucial principle totally wrong. Dude was smart but damn he was not fit to be a professor.
I passed organic with flying colors and barely scratched out a passing grade in that fucking class.

>What was the hardest course in your major?
That completely depends on who's teaching what in a given semester.

Calc 1

Organic chemistry. Yes.

Physics graduate.

In terms of the exam, the killer at our uni always was and probably still is, Classical Electrodynamics, because of the sheer volume - and the technical aspects of the taught material.

There were rumours floating around that quite a few students would actually dedicate an entire semester just to ED, and focus on that course and getting through the exam.

I had a class like this. Intro to cultural anthropology. Took it before I knew what I wanted to do, just to sample the field.

I passed with an A, but I don't even know what that class was about. Honestly. Just a history lesson of how racist anthropology used to be. Didn't even really talk about any other cultures in any depth. Yet the work was like two 100 page Marx/Foucalt trash reading per week, group presentations, "field reports" and essays out the ass. I hated that fucking course.

kek m8

Take your pedophile cartoons back to .

Medical school

Gross anatomy pharmacology and neurobiology

Anyone else a retard when it comes to probability or stochastics? I get great grades when it comes to analysis or algebra, but stochastics just turns me into a drooling moron.

Can anyone try to make me learn to love probability theory?

well if you do probability theory the right way, it's getting a lot more analytic (measure/integration theory and stochastic processes)
if you are talking about statistics it doesn't get better

It's probability yeah. Measure theory is on next year's course, and i'm pretty excited to learn this thing i feel like i should have learned earlier ideally.

Engineering student here
This is true

Haha oh man you know nothing of the struggle

I'm an engineer and I'm teaching myself measure theory and topology in my free time. Differential geometry after

Is the math degree worth it?
(Other than the personal interest)

if you want to do research in math you need it
it's also good for math-related fields like economics or finance or applied math and shit

Honors Analysis, people weren't expected to get most of the problems right.

>mfw when I take the "hardest" CS course and it's a joke

CS.

Hardest course: operating systems

The professor told us it was the hardest course. He was right. Then again, he assigned way more homework in that class than he did any other. I loved it, but I had no free time toward the end of the semester.

Of course, it was a shit tier state school in a podunk town with 10k people. Light on theory, heavy on cranking out coders. Someone from a school that actually teaches things like complexity theory would probably have a different answer.

>I'm an engineer and I'm teaching myself measure theory and topology in my free time.

The world needs more engineers like you.

Hardest course I've taken would probably be 'advanced complex analysis and Riemann surfaces'. This wasn't an undergrad course however. The hardest course in my undergrad Mathematics was titled 'algebra' which covered ring theory, modules over rings, field extensions and some Galois theory.

Haha I know it's totally useless to me but I'm just a curious guy.
Really I'm a wanna-be physicist but I also want to make a good living

>took meme classes on game development at my first year
>feeling le game dev
>decide to take " Native Software Engineering" (optional course)
>lol must be fun XDD :ddddddd
>choose an Atari game for my project
>discover that i would have to learn it's assembler, in-depth computer architecture, Stella (atari 2600 multi-plataform simulator) and complete the game :^)))))))))))
>basically had to dedicated my entire weekend to it for 3 months

at least it was a great learning experience and i'm way more humble & self-aware of my skills since then

Machine Elements

Definitely Syntax 1. Guy was tough and would only lecture on the material AFTER collecting the papers for it, so that we'd think for ourselves and all that jazz. In hindsight I appreciate the challenge, but at the time it was 15 pages~ per week of assignments for a brand new subject, super brutal.

Learning Japanese
/end thread

As other said, hardest is somewhat relative to who's teaching it.

In my case, I'd go with graduate statistical physics. The guy was a serious theoretician and taught off out of one of the most dense books on the field. His math was heavily asbtract and taught completely new, somewhat specific areas once a week. I honestly had no idea what to do in the slightest for two of the exam final questions but thankfully we could choose from like 5.

Comp Sci:

Operating Systems and Compiler Construction like mentioned

For EE:

Many students get rekted in Signals and Systems and/or Comptuer Organization. These courses are always offered in spring/summer for those who don't pass them in fall.

>rekt in signals or comp arch
does your schools average chromosome count hover around 47

probably theory is babby tier difficulty

im pretty sure stoich doesn't actually make sense to anyone and the prof just wanted to fuck with my gpa

my dad is a CE, there were a few choice classes setup in the same manner when he was in school.

Fortunately, the only classes I have to fear are biochem I & II.. my body is not ready.

>2 DEGREES
>SHIT TIER RETARD DETECTED

DEPTH OVER BREVITY IN TODAYS WORLD MOTHERFUCKER

Humanities where you are forced to le make new friends xD in group works

test

I really enjoyed neurobiology.

Calculus
Organic Chemistry

Propably from undergrad measure and integral course. Boy, I do like sigma algebras

Is Biochem really that hard? I wanna major in it, and it seems pretty interesting/.

Lol yeah I've heard measure theory is one of the hardest courses you can take.

From my DE professor and one of the Masters students in Physics

Category Theory for comp sci? Where on earth do you live, Australia? (Not that it's a bad thing, but it's not even required for math majors in most places, even though it should be.)

For undergrad, either Analysis or PDEs. The Analysis class was taught by a Chinese professor who had a very thick accent and gave excessively hard problems on exams that were graduate level. He was teaching graduate level real analysis that semester as well and, to alleviate his own workload, he would give nearly identical exams. Only two questions would be different on the exams; everything else, the same.

The PDEs course was taught by a former Hungarian allstar from the 70s/80s. He was practically high or drunk all the time (or seemed like it) and he would make a ton of numerical errors/mistakes, but when he was ready, he was a fucking roller coaster of rigor and mathematical intensity. He'd fill up the chalkboards when an especially theoretical aspect of PDEs came up and would explain it to us with immense glee in his eyes. His exams were very difficult, but fair -- they were clearly designed for those who sought to achieve graduate level study.

Both experiences were difficult and I received good grades.

I had a very tough time in undergrad with Electromagnetism and received a lackluster grade, but it was later discovered that the professor purposefully fucked students over because he wasn't awarded tenure and decided to give absurd examinations. Half of the class complained to the chairperson afterward I found out and he saw the exam questions; one question was from a recent PhD Qualifier. That nigga was on a rampage.

It's probably Cryptography because the professor is a former NSA employee and that he's a hard-ass grader. Average is usually in the 30s.

It could also be Biometrics or Data Mining & Warehousing because the professor has incredibly high expectations from his students. He would even stump the PHD students.

I'm It depends on what you want to do with your comp sci degree. In general I wouldn't recommend it unless you plan on working with a lot of formal logic and abstractions. I for instance am interested in doing work in programming language theory, a topic that sits at an intersection between category theory, type theory, and formal logic (mostly non-classical logics). The material covered in the courses in the pure math program wasn't really relevant 95% of the time but the experience and comfort I gained with formal reasoning, proofs, and rigor was extremely useful (you don't often see this level of pedantry in other parts of comp sci).

My university is very flexible with breadth requirements and electives. I actually started out in pure math and was using comp sci for almost all of my electives. By the time I got close to graduating I had already obtained enough courses in the comp sci department that I may as well just do two degrees and take a few extra courses that I was interested in anyway.

Category Theory is actually pretty commonly taught in computer science departments. It's not exactly a required course in our program but rather our program requires a certain number of high level courses and category theory fits the bill. There's also a grad level Homotopy Type Theory course (not Homotopy Theory) in our comp sci department that I sat in on.

Structural Macroeconometrics

Electromagnetism II
Didn't help that the professor made half the exam a multiple choice which was riddled with trick questions

Chem degree

The physical chemistries by a long shot were the most difficult. Organic was a ton of memorization
>inb4 not if you know the rules
Almost all organic 1 classes make you memorize functional groups and all that shit. If you can store a lot in your head, you'll be fine.

Physical chemistry 1 was essentially a crash course in thermodynamics, while p chem 2 was quantum mechanics. Chem majors often aren't required to take math beyond calc 2, so the differential equations in both classes were difficult to grasp. Maybe if I'd had a handle on the math better they would've been easier. But still, those that did struggled too. Test averages were usually in the 60s

Mechanical Engineering
The cocks

I remember Mammalogy lab being a huge pain. Memorizing 400 species of mammal by scientific name and the sight of their stuffed corpse isn't too useful. You'll forget it all by the time you need to identify something and knowing their scientific name doesn't honestly help all that much. It's not like dichotomous keys aren't a thing. The day before the test I'd study corpses till my brain hurt and I couldn't think anymore then get up and destroy test. The next day all the information would be gone.

Soils wasn't great either, but that was more the professors fault than anything.

Everyone else had trouble with the math in population dynamics.

>mfw retarded classmates actually bought griffiths for $120 or whatever ludicrous price it goes for now

Chemical Engineering here.

Principles of Chemical Reactivity, entire class got a 50% boost on their final grade because the final exam was eye-wateringly difficult.

Thermodynamics, 80% of the class had below a C.

To be quite honest, the classes were not all that hard. Engineers are just fucking retarded and at my school, everyone loves to be a huge degenerate and party all day. Unfortunately I was one of them during my first few semesters so I have a very poor GPA currently, but the last semester I really pulled my socks up and am blowing everyone out of the water.

I have lots of trouble with numerical methods and linear algebra though, it's because they don't teach much theory associated with it all. I can't grasp stuff like eigenvectors and eigenvalues and why Jacobian matrices work in most of the numerical methods. The profs just tell us it works and thats it. I can apply it just fine, but I really want to know how it all works.

Failure rates just trim the retards it says nothing about difficulty. The course with the highest failure rate at my university is intro to chemical engineering which is literally just mass balance logic problems.

Hardest course in my programme is chemical thermo II followed closely by control engineering.

We had a proof heavy numerical analysis (yes analysis) class in our cheme programme it was fucking retarded we spent the entire semester rigorously developing the baby methods and doing proofs that should've been self study instead of getting to the methods we actually need like FDM. Also zero programming in that course, a complete waste of credits to feed some math aspies ego because he's department didn't let him teach senior level.

Why are you still struggling with baby LA and mutli var calc? You can just read the wiki page you can learn all those concepts in an hour or two.

you do rudin in 20 weeks then

>Computer Science
An advanced algorithms class kicked my ass because I approached it wrong. The questions were modifications of the hard exercises from K&T or CLRS.

Surprisingly I found compilers really easy, though I'd worked the summer before on a compiler as a research assistant. It ended up being more tedious than anything.

>Mathematics
Computability & complexity was quite challenging but I studied heaps and got a good grade. The guy who taught it is a somewhat renowned computability theorist and went at a blisteringly fast pace.

Analysis kicked my ass. The first few weeks were just some basic topology and I didn't really grasp that properly.

Oh shit, how could I forget: a second year "capstone class", where the main project was to make a game with a whole bunch of requirements. We went way too ambitious. The other guys were good but didn't have the experience to be able to pull it off. Slept on campus a few nights and barely went to lectures.

Why the fuck would it be useless?
Broaden your knowledge then broaden the list of the possible jobs you can get.
Plus more mathematics always comes in handy, it improves problem solving skills anyway.

That's really shitty, I did the analysis on my own time and it was really easy and basic stuff. Luckily my numerical course included MATLAB programming as well.

I was sort of speaking in the past tense, I went and learned the theory on my own time and like you said it was quite easy and took very little effort. I just feel it would be beneficial to maybe spend a lecture or two total going over the background.

Then again, my school also had a massive fail rate to what you called intro to chem eng. It was all mole and mass balance around a chemical process or single unit. Shit was unthinkably easy, yet something like 30% failed. I have no idea how, maybe that's why they don't teach us theory in class anymore.

Only going into third year so I'll be doing Thermo II and controls this year. Our courses are called Fluid Phase and Reaction Equilibrium, which is what I assume Thermo II.

Algebra 3 made everyone shit themselves but the prof went easy on us in the final exam

Probably Algorithms. We have two professors that alternate between teaching the class. In any case, a lot of students either retake the class or switch to a BA because of the class.

I'm a CE. I had OS, CompArch and SigSys and some CS theory classes.
I found them very good, basically they are the core of the degree.
I had much auto-didactically earned knowledge in both CompArch,OS and electronics though.

Generally the kind of people who find them hard or get rekted are usually those who are:
a, not so bright.
b, just want to get a paper. Dispassionate assholes.
c, most of the time think they only need to know and learn what the lecture covered with absolutely no auto-didactic skills and they make no projects in their free-time. They essential think university is going to teach them everything and don't really do anything on their own.
d, Lazy or don't care for whatever reason.

What degree do you study? I'm only interested because of the Hungarian guy. I'm also Hungarian.
There are some mad motherfuckers around here.

The problem with our thermo II is that our thermo I was dumbed down to a meche/physics programme thermo (because the lecturer isn't great in chemical solutions thermo) and the thermo II prof uses the rigorous postulatory approach (the way Perry teaches it), but still uses smith van ness abboth which is horribly outdated so new methods he tests have to be studied in scattered notes and research papers every that passed relied on memorizing answers to old exam papers.

I'm actually a TA for that class now and I've finally convinced him to adopt a new textbook (the glorious exposition of Pabla and Schieber).

Control can be either very simple or very hard depending on the lecturer, strictly speaking ChemEs should study non-linear systems with deadtime elements (Seborg level) which requires a shitton of applications from complex and functional analysis, z-calculus etc. It's a lot of new work to learn in a 1-2 semester course. Though some lecturers dumb it down to all linear systems with baby proofs and little work on the computational side required to solve non-linear.

This user here pretty much. Now with that being said, our EE program isn't quite as popular as say MechE or ChemE is so for those with a GPA lower than the required for either of those programs end up in EE.

Honestly the math in signals and systems or in any other engineering class is pretty straightforward and somewhat uninteresting. I've started self studying abstract algebra and it's pretty neat so far.

Thanks for the tips, we also still use smith van ness and abboth as well for Thermo II, think I'll pick up Pable and Schieber to supplement the class.