What was a class you thought was easy but was hard?

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Astra

Astra

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For me philosophy.

It was supposed to be a class with all online exams..... well it turns out that my professor decided to make it all written in class this semester. So I am stuck learning a lot of philosophy.
 
Any class that deals with pendulums (usually math/physics/engineering).

Trajektorie_eines_Doppelpendels.gif


http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/DoublePendulum.html

Seriously, the math involved is obscure... that's why I'll never look at a pendulum clock the same way anymore.
 
Immuno. I figured it would be an extension of micro. Oh was I wrong.
 
Can't remember the formal title but it was something about 'professional writing'. Thought it would be a basic English class, little did I know it would be a storm of weekly analytical writing pieces, obscure books, ridiculous presentations, and a man who believed that only English majors deserved 'As'.
 
I had a business writing class that killed me this year. Tough grader and ambiguous instructions. So glad I waited to take the class after I had applied.

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Spanish. Boy was I wrong.

Also, an graduate-level genetics course. Was told it was all info from the human genome project onward, but failed to realize that meant it was reading all primary lit. about genetics. Took it second semster senior year and ended up having to spend pretty much the equivalent of organic amounts of time on the class. It was really fascinating and I absolutely loved the class, and ended up doing well, but holy crap was it hard and very time consuming.
 
@eteshoe The writing classes definitely turned out harder than I thought. Luckily I like to write so it was a matter of learning how to refine my words to the topic at hand.

@EaglesontheWarpath Learning a foreign language in college was a much harder experience than I thought. Since then, though, I've appreciated language more than ever in anything I'm learning. Sounds weird but when you realize that every meaning doesn't necessarily have a word in another language, or a different word or phrase altogether, it gets hard to take words (or any form of communication) for granted.

Otherwise, I either expected a course to be hard, and it turned out either easier, just as hard as expected, or much harder.
 
@Dandine I just don't have the mind for language. Honestly my grasp of english grammar is so poor that trying to compare/learn another language's grammatical ways was downright brutal. But my school was liberal arts so I had to take it. Prior to that I had taken four years in high school, but I wasn't very good at it then either argh :bang:
 
@EaglesontheWarpath For me it wasn't so much the grammar that was the problem but rather stumbling through using different words for the meaning you want, especially if it's something you need to think about to say for a discussion. Hard enough to do in English, brutal to do in a different language. Probably could have benefited from more immersion if I had to do it over, but I don't regret it.
 
Biostatistics, Im good at bio and stats so I figured Id be great at biostats...I was wrong.
 
Psychology of health and illness

No answer was ever 100% correct, grading was based solely on the professor's mood that day, and several of the things we were taught had little to no evidence behind it. It was an online course. I wrote 40 page reviews because it was one of those courses where "every piece of text in the book is fair game" while everyone else just cheated through the exams. Never again.
 
Marine bio/eco. Professor gave college level exams (averages in the 60%s) but kept grading scale as if it were High School (90-100% = A, 80-90%=B, 70-80%=C etc etc).
 
Religion. My friends said this was an easy class, but man did not being raised in a religious household put me behind . . . Pulled through with an 89.5 though. Thank God for rounding and generous professors.
 
Dandine said:
@eteshoe The writing classes definitely turned out harder than I thought. Luckily I like to write so it was a matter of learning how to refine my words to the topic at hand.
.....
Click to expand...

Yea writing classes are always a crapshoot for me. I'm a decently strong writer but I wasn't expecting that much work to get an A, especially since I remember having other "tougher" courses that term which meant too many time sinks lol.
 
Astra118 said:
For me philosophy.

It was supposed to be a class with all online exams..... well it turns out that my professor decided to make it all written in class this semester. So I am stuck learning a lot of philosophy.
Click to expand...
Same here.
 
First year compositions class. It's a first year class only open to non-English majors, so I thought how hard could it be? The teacher was such a hard marker. The highest mark in first assignment (worth 20%) was an 84%, and my teacher tried to convince us that this 84% is our 100% for this class. I wanted to tell her cute story but we don't live in this class nor do we apply to professional schools in this class so your philosophy makes no sense.
The amount of writing I had to do for that class is also ridiculous. I literally had to finish 7-8 pages of writing every week to get "peer-reviewed". Eventually most people just stopped going to class because they didn't finish the assignment so they would have nothing to peer review, which sucks for them because 20% of our grade is participation.

I literally wasted half of my school work time on that friggin first year class. Never. Ever. Again.
 
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Well as a freshman, in my first term, I took a 200 level political science class thinking it would be easy. Ended up with sophomore/junior poli-sci majors, and I think I had to read about 100 pages every night and write a paper every week.

Basically, I learned the hard way what the "Intro to" before a course title really meant lol
 
archaeology

my friend travelled around the world so he knew some of the places from his travels.

I ended up with a B+
 
Philosophy for me as well. The professor was a nut, he had no notes and there was no assigned reading, he just yapped on and on about theories of existence with no rhyme or reason to his madness. He also had terrible reviews online saying how disorganized he was. He would spend chunks of class time arguing with those reviews, claiming that he was actually organized. It was a mess. Tests consisted of timed essays which would normally be fine but with that class I had no idea how to organize a coherent essay in the allotted time. Couple that with the fact that I was concurrently taking 3 other hard science classes and you have a recipe for an easy A gone wrong.
 
Intro to molecular and cell bio... Struggled to stay afloat in that class, finishing with a B- after getting a D and a C in the first two tests. It was terrible at the time but in hindsight it was a good experience. It forced me to figure out how to properly study and to not underestimate any courses.
 
Gen chem II. Hardest exams I've ever taken. On top of studying, I would spend a week reworking problems from the book and class.. Then I'd get to the exam and only half the the questions even made sense. I ended up making the only earned A, though.

I have had other classes in which I underestimated the amount of work I needed to put in, but that Gen Chem course and a course Im in now are the only ones where no reasonable amount of effort would have made that much of a difference haha
 
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micro/macro econ... probably because I fell asleep during them
 
@Bones 2020 Oh yeah, there was that one PS class I took freshman year among upperclassmen, as you did. I expected it to be hard, but it was in a very different way. Still can't believe I got through those exams!
 
History of American Music...the first three classes started with Elvis and such and it seemed very interesting and modern. Then, the add/drop period ended and we went back in time to Native American rain dances and spent most of the semester memorizing 18th century piano pieces. Had to learn them by ear. The non-music majors did not fare so well, I ended up with a C+ and spent more time on his class than I did learning genetics. I wish I knew ahead of time that the professor got his doctorate at Julliard for piano.


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