<p>I’ve read a lot of posts about college calculus being difficult for many people. Do most of you think Calculus was your toughest freshman class or do you think physics (or something else) was worse?</p>
<p>Calculus is a “weed-out” course at a lot of schools so it might be the hardest freshman course at a lot of schools. I have also heard of physics being used this way. A lot of it will depend on your school and professors you get though.</p>
<p>For me it was calc but that is because I took an honors calc. It was incredibly tough but incredibly rewarding, as I was muh better at calc when I was done with that honors sequence. I loved that class!</p>
<p>The one I hated the most was PSYC 100. Mainly because I didn’t care and didn’t want to read that garbage when I had more interesting work to do.</p>
<p>Besides that, I think the concept of weed out classes are played up to the extreme here. I don’t really think there is such a thing. Those early classes weed out a lot of people because a lot of people just can’t hack it in engineering. College is different from high school. The professors won’t hold your hand. These classes aren’t designed to weed you out; they are designed to teach you material at a college level. Some people just can’t adjust.</p>
<p>My first electricity and magnetism course was pretty damn tough for me. I didn’t particularly enjoy using calculus to calculate the electric field generated by all kinds of Gaussian surfaces. That was probably my toughest course. Introduction to electrical engineering was also rough. Basically my beef is with the electrical courses…and I’m happily not in electrical engineering :).</p>
<p>I forgot about circuits being my freshman year. It was terrible.</p>
<p>In my experience physics has been tougher than calc (especially the EM bit). It wasn’t super-hard conceptually relative to calc, but they just piled on a ton of work.</p>
<p>As for circuits…I actually like them. I admit I was thrown off at first by Thevenin/Norton, but so far everything has been smooth sailing.</p>
<p>I’m also taking a killer bioe lab class, but that’s normally not meant for freshmen, so I don’t know if that counts.</p>
<p>For Freshman year, Physics, and yes, it was a good “weed-out” course for Engineers</p>
<p>So far, Orgo, closely followed by Physics (Mechanics). Though I had insanely hard high school calc, so that probably is what stopped it from being calc. Linear Algebra was kind of hard too, but that was mostly because I pretty much had to teach myself, my professor sucked. </p>
<p>I guess I haven’t really finished the freshman classes yet. I still need to take DiffEQ and E&M. I’m taking those this summer though.</p>
<p>So far Calc has been nothing but fun for me. What I hate is Chemistry. As the professor jumps around trying to get his point across I sit there and scratch my head wondering," how the hell did they come up with this?" I take physics next semester. I used to think that it would be a fun class but after reading this thread I’m a little nervous.</p>
<p>I LOVED physics. Don’t get discouraged!</p>
<p>I dunno, it was sort of a tie between “Introduction to Public Speaking” and “History of American Pop Music.” </p>
<p>Calculus and physics were a breeze compared to those two. </p>
<p>(Ha ha, just kidding.)</p>
<p>Electricity & magnetism was the worst for me.</p>
<p>For years other than freshman year, one of the toughest courses was Junior Year ChE Fluid Dynamics where </p>
<p>you would sit down for the midterm exam, </p>
<p>be handed the exam with four questions. </p>
<p>Then a coldness would begin to feel in your spine as you looked around, along with the other blank stares of the other students, and wondered whether you were in the right class - </p>
<p>since you had never seen any of the material covered by the 4 questions in the exam -</p>
<p>done purposely by the professor to allow you to use your “creative mind” to use previously studied material on new areas never before discussed in class or in the assigned reading.</p>
<p>So you jot down as many equations that you believe might be needed to solve each of the 4 questions and hope to get some kind of credit for this. </p>
<p>You get only 8/40 points correct, but very few students get more than 10/40 points -</p>
<p>allowing for your 8/40 score to result in a “B” for the midterm exam…</p>
<p>and chlling nightmares of this experience for decades to come…</p>
<p>Hey, who said that Engineering was fun in college?</p>
<p><a href=“all%20of%20the%20above%20after%20you%20just%20pulled%20an%20all-nighter%20stuying%20for%20the%20exam”>I</a>*</p>
<p>I did that plenty of times for Modern Physics.</p>
<p>ken, what?</p>
<p>you pull all nighters?
got chills in your spine upon first seeing the exam?</p>
<p>or just jotted down as many equations that you knew to get part credit?</p>
<p>Oops, I forgot to insert the quote. Anyway, I was referring to jotting down equations on an exam and somehow manipulating them to get a couple of points.</p>
<p>I never really pulled all nighters. By the night before, if I knew the material, then I knew it; if I didn’t, then I didn’t. After the first exam, I actually spent less time studying the material and focused more on other courses because I was confident enough with the curve.</p>
<p>Haha, oh fluids. I think I got a B once on a fluids test. Then again, fluids is kinda my thing so I was just kind of naturally good at/fascinated with it.</p>
<p>All three for me, JohnAdams! Physics was that way for me.</p>
<p>bones, fluids was one of my favorite classes, they just thought that those exams had to be something that you had never seen before…</p>
<p>I remember one exam problem being a stream of water impinging on a plate. We had to find the force on the plate and other things. That was brutal but I figured it out.</p>