What was the hardest test you ever taken?

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Most difficult individual questions (requires most precision): Quantum Mechanics final

Most difficult material to learn (requires greatest cognition): Abstract Algebra II final

Most grueling in terms of studying and test (requires most memory): USMLE Step I

The MCAT is far from the hardest test I have ever taken. Once anyone has taken Step I (or probably even their path final) they will no doubt agree.
 
Hardest test: Constitutional Law final--18 single spaced pages in three hours of straight up court case facts. Somehow I developed a knee problem during the test.

Worse performance: 1st block of biochem 1st year of med school
 
Lots of my science courses finals would be considered very hard. My secret to test taking to get an A to the point were right after the test you know for a fact you got an A is to do three things. Read the textbooks, write note cards, then study the note cards. Note cards help me memorize every single term.
 
I would have to say my test in life in which I did not receive an interview to my dream school, even though people who had applied after me got interviews b/c of their better stats.

Perhaps the kind of answer you were looking for-- a genetics exam that I took. I had no freakin idea what I was doing, and I had studied hard-- I had studied ALL the material ever given in that class, from class notes to homeworks.
 
The hardest tests that exist have nothing to do with academics.
 
Oh...and I had diarrhea during my first O-Chem exam. Boy howdy that was fun.
 
Well the other day my girlfriend turned away from me and asked me what color her eyes were...........


On that note, sleeping in a car is definitely not as bad as people make it out to be. =/
 
Techmed07 said:
What was it like?
How did you prepare for it?
How did you do?

......if the MCAT was the hardest test you taken, pick the 2nd most difficult one.
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Discreet Math was my hardest.....i studied with friends, i got an A in the class but i worked pretty hard for it..........
 
Hmmm....MCAT was not necessarily that difficult, just long and frustrating and important.

I'd have to say either graduate level algorithms (after never taking algorithms as an undergrad) or engineering electromagnetics (basically gigantic word problems with applying high level calculus and multiple variables; we got a cheat sheet, and it was basically guessing which formula to use and knowing how to apply it; I didn't understand squat about what was actually underneath).
 
Every one of my Organic tests in college. Our professors gave us 4 hours to do them, at night no less (so we wouldn't waste class or lab time), and it was open books/open notes. Sounds great, right? Wrong. That just meant absolutely ridiculous mechanisms and synthesis problems. Rarely did anyone in the class finish on time, and the average was usually 50 or lower.

Had 4 of these plus finals. I wanted to kill myself after each one. The final, funny enough, was actually easier because they had to make it fit the school's time slot. Of course, this was the same class where functional groups and nomenclature were skipped entirely because "you can learn that stuff on your own", so I should have expected it. Even though we had separate tests on those things throughout the year (outside of class, of course).

That class was the hardest C I ever earned, and I still fared better than a good portion of my friends.
 
My champion of hard exams would have to be the Organic II fourth exam. The true final was the ACS exam, which the prof didn't like- he said it was too easy- so he made his fourth exam both worth more and harder than the ACS.

Example problem. 40 points (of 200). Using methane, benzoic acid, water, ammonia and oxygen (along with any needed spectator reagents) synthesize this molecule.
200px-Taxol.svg.png


Show your work.

There was no partial credit. You hit all 27 required steps, or got a zero for the problem.

A close second was the final exam for my Cell Bio class. 100 questions, 200 points, 2 hours. Not bad, right?

Wrong.

Each question had answer choices phrased thusly: Select the correct answer or answers. No answer may be correct, in which case you leave the question blank. For any given question, none, one, two, three, four or all five answers may be correct. Making it worse, he gave a point for each correct answer, and deducted one for each wrong answer. It was wholly possible (and did happen) for people to get negative scores on the exam!

All of his exams were like this, and by the end of the course, I'd averaged a 27 for a C+. High average was a 51, and the low score on any exam was a -32. He would have done better to stay home.
 
OCallag said:
Well, my score on the MCAT would not indicate this, but the MCAT was actually the 2dn/3rd hardest test. Organic lab at my school is traditionally one of the hardest classes you can take, in large part because the final is absolutely ridiculous.
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Good memories with Donald Hunt! I actually liked him for some reason, he didn't have any bull****. My best friend actually killed that final, got an A+, even though he was ranked middled of his section, and asked Hunt for a rec letter. At one of his interviews, he was told that Hunt stated in the letter that he had gotten the second highest score on that final. Anyhow, good luck. And I do have to agree that those lab finals were one the hardest and most ridiculous exams I've taken.
 
Flaxmoore said:
My champion of hard exams would have to be the Organic II fourth exam. The true final was the ACS exam, which the prof didn't like- he said it was too easy- so he made his fourth exam both worth more and harder than the ACS.

Example problem. 40 points (of 200). Using methane, benzoic acid, water, ammonia and oxygen (along with any needed spectator reagents) synthesize this molecule.
200px-Taxol.svg.png


Show your work.

There was no partial credit. You hit all 27 required steps, or got a zero for the problem.

A close second was the final exam for my Cell Bio class. 100 questions, 200 points, 2 hours. Not bad, right?

Wrong.

Each question had answer choices phrased thusly: Select the correct answer or answers. No answer may be correct, in which case you leave the question blank. For any given question, none, one, two, three, four or all five answers may be correct. Making it worse, he gave a point for each correct answer, and deducted one for each wrong answer. It was wholly possible (and did happen) for people to get negative scores on the exam!

All of his exams were like this, and by the end of the course, I'd averaged a 27 for a C+. High average was a 51, and the low score on any exam was a -32. He would have done better to stay home.
Click to expand...



😱😱😱
 
lord_jeebus said:
I've taken MCAT, USMLE Steps 1 and 2, the NBME Surgery Shelf, and all sorts of beastly gross anatomy tests, but by far the hardest test was the Chemistry 32 final at Stanford, which I took 7 years ago and still frightens me. I wonder if this class still exists.

Perhaps someone else here is familiar with this beast. It's the only test I've ever run out of time on - I left at least 1/4 blank. It was an inch thick. I scored about 30% and that was good enough for an A.

The material was kind of like:

(Hydromagnetic Magnetoidal Dimensions.) For ten points: When traveling at a subsonic speed during the last one hour of hypersleep, which vector of the Romulan nebula will suffer the wrath of the impenetrable quickening? And for extra points, how many wraths till the nearest molton? Be specific, this is a real question.


(I'm sure someone here knows the answer)
Click to expand...


42.
 
Techmed07 said:
hahahah... well in the thread and specify that had to be academic, I thought it would be assumed....but lets hear you hardest life test as well.
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Beating my SDN addiction.
 
Genetics. It wasn't so much the material as the format of the exams. Multiple choice, with 10-20 answers per question. It was supposedly to "remove the guess factor," but really I think it was just because the prof was an ass. Honestly, if you want to remove the guess factor, make it fill in the blank instead of multiple choice. There were so many VERY SIMILAR options that I would keep thinking I chose the wrong one. Uncool. There were two profs in the course, and for the exams the first one wrote, I was on the B+/A- borderline. Unfortunately, the second prof's exams killed me and I ended up with a C in the course overall. 🙁
 
I think it'd be a toss up between a two hour oral final in quantum field theory and a 24 hour take home exam in fluid dynamics where every problem had g steps, was in n dimensions in einstein notation and there was no book for the course.

i think of all the science courses I've taken, the physics ones were always the worst. You know it's going to be bad when the professor shows up and says "it took me 50 minutes to do the first 4 problems on the test, so I added one more to fill up the hour"
 
i had this one O-chem midterm where the average was like 30 out of 115, and two people in the class got a score of -1....... now thats pretty harsh
 
My hardest exam was our first medical school exam earlier this week (and I thought my undergraduate biochemistry II exam was rough when we had to draw out the entire citric acid cycle, intermediates, enzymes, products, and structures). It compared in stress levels (well at least for me) to the MCAT. And I know there are worse ones to come, including the USMLE Step exams. Medicine is all about tests, so you have to get used to it.
 
Probably exams from developmental biology. Professor was brilliant, wish I had more like him. Really made us think.
 
lord_jeebus said:
I've taken MCAT, USMLE Steps 1 and 2, the NBME Surgery Shelf, and all sorts of beastly gross anatomy tests, but by far the hardest test was the Chemistry 32 final at Stanford, which I took 7 years ago and still frightens me. I wonder if this class still exists.

Perhaps someone else here is familiar with this beast. It's the only test I've ever run out of time on - I left at least 1/4 blank. It was an inch thick. I scored about 30% and that was good enough for an A.
Click to expand...

😱 YIKES!!! Reminds me of the Calc-based physics exams where if you pulled a 50% on an exam that was an A...
 
Definitely Computer Science Subject GRE.
 
A translation test in Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik - the German spoken between 1300-1500 (I was at the University of Vienna as an exchange student at the time, so I was taking the test with native speakers). We had to translate the text from historical German to contemporary German.
 
Flaxmoore said:
My champion of hard exams would have to be the Organic II fourth exam. The true final was the ACS exam, which the prof didn't like- he said it was too easy- so he made his fourth exam both worth more and harder than the ACS.

Example problem. 40 points (of 200). Using methane, benzoic acid, water, ammonia and oxygen (along with any needed spectator reagents) synthesize this molecule.
200px-Taxol.svg.png


Show your work.

There was no partial credit. You hit all 27 required steps, or got a zero for the problem.

A close second was the final exam for my Cell Bio class. 100 questions, 200 points, 2 hours. Not bad, right?

Wrong.

Each question had answer choices phrased thusly: Select the correct answer or answers. No answer may be correct, in which case you leave the question blank. For any given question, none, one, two, three, four or all five answers may be correct. Making it worse, he gave a point for each correct answer, and deducted one for each wrong answer. It was wholly possible (and did happen) for people to get negative scores on the exam!

All of his exams were like this, and by the end of the course, I'd averaged a 27 for a C+. High average was a 51, and the low score on any exam was a -32. He would have done better to stay home.
Click to expand...

was the prof expecting you to replicate his thesis work on an exam? wtf
 
Revenant said:
Oh...and I had diarrhea during my first O-Chem exam. Boy howdy that was fun.
Click to expand...


bwahahah I feel your pain that happened to me once my freshmen year. For my MCAT I took two imodiumAD's even though it hasn't happened since.
 
After the MCAT I'd say every exam in Clinical Embryological Development & Congenital Malformations...our professor was an M.D./Ph.D who pulled questions off old USMLE exams....Absolutely Brutal...the curves were like 20+ points...I ended up w/ an A but I'd don't think anyone truly 'earned' a straight up A in that class...
 
badasshairday said:
Biochem final exam.
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You'll love med school...it's like taking a biochem final every two weeks. I've done well so far though, and my class average is something like 85%. Here's something really sad...I was talking to some classmates, and we were excited about the weekend...but just because it meant we could cram ~10 hours of studying into one day. After my test on Monday, I sincerely hope to never have to see all of the molecules from fatty acid synthesis, oxidation, ketogenesis again...not to mention all the extracellular matrix, vitamins, minerals, and DNA information that we've seen in the last two weeks. I can't wait for this class to be over but we have three more weeks. Then we start anatomy, which is pretty terrifying, from what I've heard.

And yet I'm on SDN right now..oh well, back to the books.
 
The Immunology test I took two weeks ago is the hardest test I've ever taken.

I made a 63%, and that's by far the lowest grade I've made on a test since I've been in college.

It was unbelievable.

The best part?

I don't have all of the prerequisites for the class, and my account just slipped by the computer when I was signing up for the class. The true prerequisites weren't loaded into the system yet, so I'm so lost it's unbelievable.

Seriously, unbelievable.

Never had a problem in a science class, made a 95 on my first biochem test this semester, and threw down a 63 on the Immunology test.

So hard...2.5 hours long too...
 
My multivariable calc midterm, definitely. I studied so hard, and understood all the problems in the book, but my professor loved to make things as difficult as he possibly could, and I left the test thinking WTF??
 
Feedback Control Systems final. The professor suggested that, to build confidence, we flip through the exam (1 question per page) to a problem we could work. After that, we'd feel better about tackling the other problems. I flipped through the pages, reading each problem. I decided to skip each problem since I didn't know how to work them. I ended up back on page 1. About 30 minutes into the 2-hour final, I turned in a nearly blank exam. 😱

A close second were Fourier transforms (which someone else mentioned). The professor (same professor mentioned above) explained that he had to teach it, but we wouldn't understand it. He'd been taught Fourier transforms as an undergrad, for his masters, and again for his doctorate. He said he finally understood it the third time around. Although my entire class failed, at least I didn't turn it back in blank (which is why it's #2).
 
i havent taken my MCAT yet so...
it would have to be my driving test =]
 
Techmed07 said:
What was it like?
How did you prepare for it?
How did you do?

......if the MCAT was the hardest test you taken, pick the 2nd most difficult one.
Click to expand...

The knot test in Mountain Phase of Ranger School.

To prepare for it, I got a rope and tied it in a bunch of knots a zillion times.

It was a lot harder to do with Ranger Instructors yelling at you.
 
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