Unified Engineering I, II, III, & IV (MIT OpenCourseWare)
ocw.mit.edu
ocw.mit.edu
The three that come to mind immediately are
- Unified (occasionally, "unifried")
- Junior Lab (8.13/8.14), a physics course in which, among other things, you essentially replicate the most famous physics experiments (Millikan's oil drop experiment, for example). This course is such a bitch that the Physics department offers a version of the major that is mostly the same save that you don't have to take Junior Lab (8B, aka weaksauce, aka I double majored in physics and something else). This is a good candidate for hardest undergrad class at the Institute.
- Integrated Chemical Engineering, aka "Ice". While it's spoken about in hushed terms by those few who take it, my suspicion is that it's not actually as difficult as junior lab.
To give you some context regarding how much work something has to be to qualify, there are classes in EE/CS that take up, by student reports in the "underground guide" course evals, >40 hours a week of lab time, and those are generally not known by their name. In other words, full time job type time consumption (from one of your probably four or five classes) doesn't qualify for call-by-name status. Yowza.
Are there any known people who go to these hard courses without spending as much time as supposedly required?
As you'd expect, it varies substantially person to person. Nominally, each course should take up 12 hours per week, including time spent in class (n units means n hours per week spent on the class). In practice, it can be anywhere from 50% to 300% of that or more. Most people at the extreme top end of the range end up dropping the class, so the top side is pretty well bounded.
Are there any known people who go to these hard courses without spending as much time as supposedly required?
Sure. When I was a TA (for an advanced control theory class), there was a huge range of time spent. Some people never showed up for class and did great; others came to every class, recitation, and all of my office hours (that alone constitutes ~10 hours per week) and reported spending another 6 to 10 hours on each problem set, and probably double or triple that on each lab.
Most of my undergrad career I took 5 classes a term, and I did my absolute best never to study from Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon. As long as I stuck to my schedule, it was completely doable. Of course, I skipped classes and recitations that I found unhelpful in order to reduce wasted time.
I don't know about the junior lab (i'm in eecs), but when I take classes that are difficult (which has been pretty much every semester for the past 2 years :(), I am working overtime on these classes. Besides attending lectures/recitations during the day, I spend every evening, and all of my weekend coding for the projects. Having projects and labs that took over 20-30 hours to complete were the norm, and in a particularly bad semester, I'd have one of those due almost every two weeks.
Initially, there would be people who could get by without putting in as much effort because they already knew the material, but as you go higher and start talking about lab classes (where the work is punishing regardless of your knowledge/experience) or graduate classes (very intensive, almost no one can coast), you don't see people coasting.
I disagree with this. I think the reason why some classes are called by their name are usually because of speed/convenience (faster to say), to group multiple class numbers, and for obscure class numbers than nobody would recognize.
Saying "unified" is way simpler than saying "sixteen double-oh-one". Saying "eight thirteen(?)" or "eight one three" is just weird. Also note that "junior lab" is not even the name of the class, it's just a nickname (just like "ice") that makes it easier to communicate.
Also, note that Unified is actually 4 classes (course numbers). Junior lab is 2.. They're both expected to be taken over the course of a year, not a single semester. Nobody cares if you're taking 8.13 or 8.14; it's really just one thing: junior lab. If you want to know the number, you can tell by knowing the current semester.
Lastly, if you're taking a not well-known class in say, 21F, you'd say the name. Even if it's relatively popular (and easy!), nobody says "21F.302".. They say "French 2".
Sorry for the long post responding to such a minor point; I just thought it was incredibly misleading.
When you say "French 2" rather than "21F.302", you're using a descriptive rather than nominative name for the class because of lack of familiarity.
Saying "eight thirteen(?)" or "eight one three" is just weird.
But somehow calling orgo "five twelve" doesn't seem weird? That's the whole point: most classes are known by their numbers, and the ones that are given a non-numeric nominative label are generally feared.
Anyhow, this isn't just something I made up, it's something that freshmen are widely made aware of: "classes that are known by their names are usually harder." Just like "extra letters good, extra numbers bad,"[1] it's a rule of thumb rather than a law of nature.
[1] This refers to choices in freshman classes; sometimes there are alternative versions of the course offered under a slightly different title, e.g., 8.02, 8.02T, 8.022. The course with the extra letter is "good" (generally easier), whereas the course with the extra number is "bad" (harder). Nowadays I think 8.02 is identically 8.02T, though.
I'm pretty sure it would be "eight thirteen", by analogy with "five thirteen".
Great post, though I wonder if the call-by-name phenomenon is more about notoriety than actual difficulty. For instance, the only other call-by-name class I can think of is "Orgo" (5.12, Organic Chemistry), which people thought was hard but not comparable to Unified, Junior Lab, or ICE.
There's also the secondary tier of fame, classes whose numbers you can say to nearly anyone without mentioning the course. Notable examples include:
* The "Double-oh's" (6.001, 6.002, 6.003, and 6.004, the four intro Course 6 classes plus 2.007, the Course 2 intro to Design and Manufacturing)
* 170 (6.170 - Software Engineering Lab)
* 100B (18.100B - Analysis, the "more demanding" version "for students with more mathematical maturity")
Also, for 100B, I think it has something to do with there being a letter after the name. Without checking, I'm willing to guess that there are other courses at MIT numbered X.100 but not any numbered X.100B.
But on the first day of 18.100B, I distinctly remember the professor saying: "some of you are freshmen. this course is too hard for freshmen. it's also too hard for sophomores, juniors, seniors, and maybe some grad students."
That said, we call it unified because its actual course numbers are unwieldy (16.001-16.004); while the material is challenging, the real difficulty lies in having four classes thrown at you at once. I can't say whether its any more challenging than J-Lab or 100B, having not taken them, but I do know I am so glad to be done with it.
First off, this is for students in Aero-Astro program. It's not something that all engineers take; it's simply the starting courses for the aero astro people.
Second, even though the name suggests that it's some course that tries to teach you the intersection of all the topics, it's actually teaching you the union of the topics. From the course overview:
"Over the course of each semester, students engage in seven disciplines of study, listed below. Each discipline is taught for a fraction of the semester, through a series of lectures. When one discipline concludes, students are quizzed and begin a new discipline."
Similarly, if you look at the calendar ( http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-0... ). You see that the students are essentially taking each sub-course separately.
It's more for scheduling convenience and to have the students up and running with all fields in Aero-Astro than to do some grand unification of these topics.