There is not a single “most demotivating” story that I can think of from my time as a student. In hashing out ideas for this post I listed features of classes that I thought generally demotivated me, and then the classes that I took where I felt demotivated by each of those features. The two common themes in terms of demotivating features were (1) having seemingly unmotived or uninterested instructors, and (2) having uninspiring/busy work assessments. One class showed up in my list for both of those features, so I’ll describe my experience with that one.
My undergraduate algorithms course was taught by a professor who had been in the field for a long time, and had been teaching the course for a while. I’ll start out by saying that he was obviously both very smart, and very uninterested in teaching undergraduate algorithms.
If I remember correctly, we were graded only on our exams. The assignments, I think, were optional.
The first assignment was simple and interesting to me at the time: compute machine epsilon. It was fun, I did it, and learned something. I don’t remember what the next assignment was, but I remember that it was orders of magnitude harder (meaning that it probably required and order of magntiude more lines of code than the first assignment, which probably required around 5 or 10 lines of C code). Also, around this time, the lectures got unbearably boring. The instructor seemed like he had (and probably actually had) taught the material many tens of times before, and just couldn’t be bothered with it anymore. “Monotone” is an understatement. This made the lectures hard to stay engaged (i.e., awake) through, so I rapidly started falling behind, and couldn’t complete the assignments.
Then came our first exam. The professor told us that these would be open note/open book, which was encoruaging since I was having a hard time with the class. He gave a review session before the first exam, so I attended and decided that it was probably a good idea to take good notes. The review session consisted of the professor posing a question, and then answering the question. It was not interactive, just another lecture. I took detailed notes during the review session, and brought them, along with my textbook and notes from class, to the exam. The exam, to my delight at the time, consisted of the exact same questions that the professor posed in the review session. Luckily, I had my detailed notes with me and I was able to write them down, more or less verbatim. I aced the exam.
So, the formula seemed simple. Skip the class (because I could sleep better at home in bed then upright in a classroom). Go to the review session and write abosultely everything down. Bring those notes to the exam. Transfer them to the exam sheet. Turn in the exam. Ace the exam.
It worked perfectly: I got an A in algorithms, despite attending about 10% of the classes and learning almost nothing.
As it turns out, algorithms is one of my favorite subjects in CS, and I’ve mostly taught the intro material to myself from books since then. But the combination of having an unmotivated instructor and an easy A completely demotivated me to learn what would later become one of the subject areas that I was most excited about.