There have been many: FORTRAN final (but that was only because the teacher was a dumbass) Organic Chemistry 1 final Biochemistry final (probably harder than the Organic one) Calculus-Based Physics 1 final Advanced Calculus 1 final General Chemistry 2 final Business Law final Those were just in undergrad, in grad school: Linear Algebra Partial Differential Equations 1 Metric Spaces Dynamical Systems 2 But without question, if I had to choose just one, it would be Graph Theory. There was only 1 out of like 6 or 7 problems that I knew how to do, and even then I still messed up in getting the solution. I have no doubt that I made around a 0 on that final (I got a C in that damn class which wound up costing me a Master's degree in math ).
Not necessarily difficulty wise, but in terms of taking the final: During a signals final, a kid in the back of the auditorium starts having a seisure. Instead of interrupting the final, all the TA's just gather around the kid and act like nothing is going on. We were supposed to just keep taking the test. Needless to say, it was distracting. Complicating matters were the 32 oz of gatorade I drank right before the 3 hour final...
I graduated from Rice and from my experience the honor system works extremely well. I truly believe the vast majority of students do NOT cheat on their tests because the penalties are quite severe and they respect the time-honored tradition. To answer your question, yes, one of the obligations of the honor system is to report those who cheat. That being said, many of my tests at Rice were take home, open book (I was a mechanical engineering major). Many were even unlimited time. I'm not really sure how to cheat on a test like that, except for maybe working with a classmate. It would be even harder to see another person cheating because most people just take the tests in their dorm room or apartment. It's a big, big deal when you get caught cheating and many people would find out about it across campus. It's extremely shameful. This is in direct contrast with some graduates of A&M I have encountered (not to pick on the Aggies, but those are my data points, sorry). These people openly brag about how they cheated their way through school and were quite proud of how they "beat the system". In my opinion they simply cheated themselves because the point of an education is to educate, and cheating sidetracks this end goal. Now I can tell you no system is perfect, and I'm sure there are people at Rice who have cheated, but I would say on the whole is works well.
The honor system is taken <b>very</b> seriously at Rice. When take-home tests are given, the rules are followed. If you can't use your books, you don't use them. In my four years there, I never witnessed any cheating or heard anyone talking about doing it. These students take pride in doing their own work, and intellectual honesty is very important. Occasionally, somebody tries to pull a fast one and gets caught. This is usually in the form of a take-home exam or assignment where students have been told not to work together, yet you get two or more papers that are virtually identical (having the same wrong answers is a dead giveaway). They have to go before the Honor Council which is very strict. Usually, since they're not very honest people anyway, they try to lie their way out of it but it doesn't work. For doing this on an exam, you get an F in the course and a two-semester suspension. I still think too many exams at Rice are given as take-homes (I'd rather just get it over with in the classroom), but at least it's an honest environment. The professor usually leaves the room during an exam and it stays quiet in there, even in the big lecture halls. No one looks at anyone else's paper or pulls out a book. Contrast this with UT, where even the smart students program things into their calculator. In Organic Chemistry lab, they would falsify their melting points so they wouldn't be penalized for getting an impure product. I teach at a small college and just got done grading some extra credit papers. Some of them consisted of text that was cut and pasted straight off the web (not cited or quoted, of course). They will do whatever they can get away with.
Organic Chem: I got at 39 and got a B+ Molecular Viral Genetics: I got a 25 and got a D However, I got a 100 on what was considered the hardest test ever in Microbiology because I was one of five people who happened to have all the questions. Pure coincidence. He used the same exam that I had. Class average was a 45 on test. 5 of us got a 95-100 and I don't think he cared. I think he did on purpose to bring class average up.
D'oh! By the way, do NOT drink a 2-liter of Mountain Dew before an exam. Not only will you have the problem described above, but caffeine in such massive doses does not make you smarter. It just keeps you from being able to concentrate. Not that I would know this from personal experience.
Either Random Signals or Digital Signal Processing. My professor felt that you should be learning new things from his exams. Class averages on those were around 40-60 out of 250. I was usally higher than that, but still in the 100-110 range. I knew several people with single digit scores.
This trend of exams where the mean is below 50% disturbs me. Is anyone actually learning anything in those classes? If so, do they have an opportunity to show it off on the test? Or is the test so impossible that it's pretty much random which few points you get? (which is the way it seemed when I took that type of exam at Rice) I don't know how an educator can justify these things. Not, of course, that they have to, as long as their research is bringing the grants in.
For me, the toughest final exam was surprisingly my freshman CS intro class. I was in the "everything comes easy to me, screw studying because i just discovered the greatness of the mixture of unbridled freedom and alcohol" mode. After that final exam, I don't think I've ever been more frightened of receiving a report card in my entire life. Especially considering I finished the exam an hour early and when I turned it in, the professor said "Are you sure you're done? This was meant to take the full 3 hours. No one has ever finished this fast." Talk about being spooked to death!
options and futures. Not that the concept was hard, but the prof would teach us one thing and throw a nasty curve on the final. I went from an A+ in the class to a C+ and it dropped by gpa in my major below a 4 aaarrgghhhhhhhh
I couldn’t agree more. This was and is a MAJOR beef of mine. I took a class, thermodynamics, where the class average was always around 35%. The tests were ridiculous and bore a scant resemblance at best to anything we studied in class. The questions were huge, taking about ½ hour each, and partial marks were minimal. I got a B in the class, which probably meant that I got 2 of the six questions on the final right, and I really have no idea which two, plus a few partial marks. Total BS. Ridiculously hard classes are never about the difficulty of the material, IMO. They are always about how the prof. handles the class.
First of all, I knew I was right about Rice. i knew y'all were too wimpy too cheat. j/k of course. something just told me that the honor system was followed very strictly. about a&m people bragging about cheating, this is fairly common at UT, at least among the 8 or so people i really know in ChE and among the other people i sorta know in ChE. we have very good methods, don't get caught, and get the job done, and we are usually quite proud of it. i think we almost owe it to the classes we take sometimes b/c some ChE stuff is just ridiculous and you feel justified going to these lengths. sometimes we're just lazy. i usually know the material anyway, but having the backup (whether it be your calculator, written on your eqn sheet, or your neighbor) is always a good feeling. as far as even the smart people typing stuff in their calc at UT, this is most definitely true. i have a 4.0 and have a friend who was 4.0 till last semester and even he joined us in typing stuff in. i really don't know if there are any people who don't, it's almost as if it's expected. i really think all we're doing is avoiding a curve b/c there would probably be one on some of these tests if we didn't have the calcs or cheat or have old tests to look over. i currently have 19 programs for my Ops II final i'll be taking tomorrow. as for making up lab data, i didn't think that even counted as cheating. our ta's and prof's usually knew that what was important was the writeup and data treatment, not what you gathered in the lab. i often just made up weights and MP's just to make the numbers prettier, nothing wrong in that it would seem. i mean they told us don't make stuff up but that was just more of a "we have to say this" type of thing, not a "we're gonna get you good if you do" type of thing. i'm sure the ta's had to know when we were printing out multiple IR's of the same sample. finally, about grade under 50 and such, i've always thought that was ridiculous. it's like professors think all this knowledge they have is supposed to be a secret we're supposed to magically uncover instead of stuff they should be giving us in the hope that we retain and understand it and know how to apply it. i've never understood throwing major curveballs on tests just to make the grades plummet. after so many years of teaching, they have to know what will screw students over and what won't. it's my experience that most people know what they are doing (especially once you've weeded people out and are in major sequence classes) and can tell when they've been screwed after a test. it's obvious when you just haven't prepared and when you've been sideswiped by impossible questions. luckily, i haven't been involved it many classes like that.
Well, since college was so long ago for me, I don't remember too many of my final exams except for my economics final in the first quarter of my freshman year. I actually don't remember this exam either except that there was a total of 200 points. My grade was around 170 out of 200. Whoever graded my exam wrote "170" on my exam and then circled the score except the line of the circle went over the "1" in "170" so it looked like I only got a "70". I was pretty shocked and scared when I saw my final grade for the class posted. I went back and asked to see my exam and got my grade corrected.
I've failed exactly one test in my entire life: The California Drivers' Test-Written. I'll go with that one as my toughest.
