College courses in which you received a 4.0 ?

creepycoug said:

I got a good education at UW. That school made me. You can get a good one anywhere if you work hard and go get it. My impression is that a decent % of UW undergrads are still there to play grab ass and aren't looking to become intellectuals. Where Washington is really elite at the undergrad level is in applied STEM. Very different subset of people in those programs.

Strong agree.

chuck said:

Oceanography 101 was the one I definitely remember. Ocean is not only easy but it's fairly interesting. I could have sat through a couple of lectures, studied the material for a few hiurs, and aced the final. That was a tap in.

I've made no secret that I didn't have a lot of big time offers out of HS and went the JC route. I had 4.0s in a few real easy ones...math 101, 105 and 107, Geography, Psych 180-something (human sexuality), music history 101. I think that was all of them. I modified my senior year of HS strategy of eekiing out a C in everything to getting the easy As and eeking out a C in any class that mattered.

I remember Oceanography 101 and the Human Sexuality courses ... you remember the ones everyone said were easy grades. I think my schedule never really lined up for those. You could also take statistics in the Sociology Department to satisfy the B school requirement for QM 201 (or whatever it was). The guy who taught the regular course the quarter I could take it was known to be a complete Nazi with grades so I said fuck it. I'll take it with the Sociology kids and cover, which I also did.

Two other sources of 4.0 grades are coming back to me. The well-known Comp. Lit guy named Willis Konick, https://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/sept99/class/konick.html . Very theatrical guy ... stood on desks, super flamboyant and all that. Easy, easy grader. I remember one class he added oral presentations to go with your paper and he's in his office with a grad student while you're talking and he's nodding off because, you know, I didn't know wtf I was talking about. 4.0. Didn't matter. At the time, I thought I wasn't learning anything, but you oughta hear me at cocktail parties now waxing on about Boris Pasternak and what he was trying to say in Dr. Shivago, and Garcia-Marquez in Autum of the Patriarch. Fuck'n a the guy did teach me something.

Last 4.0 I can remember of note was Classics G&R Mythology. Set up for the kid with either a good memory or who actually likes it. I was the latter. I ate it up, so, while it took some effort on his long ass exams, it didn't feel like work because I thought it was interesting. The guy was always announcing that the frat boys who don't come to class and are relying on their test files to cheat had better think again ... presumably because he thought he could write the exam so many different ways that they'd have to study. As I recall he did in fact burn a few frat boys who never came to class probably assuming the test file would save them.