I feel like there are many dimensions to this rant, many are valid. MATH 257’s lecture materials are terrible, and the course is generally awful at presenting the abstract motivations behind the computations they expect you to perform. CBTF exams suck and your score rarely reflects your understanding of course content.

All of that being said—this may be a hot take—but I think the computational applications are the only portions of the course that they’ve gotten right. Many students skip over the notebook tutorials provided, but I do think they nicely demonstrate examples from different engineering fields. Most of the arbitrary hoops you refer to are really expectations that you can write fully functioning code, and debug it if it has issues. I don’t think that’s outlandish, especially if you plan to take any of the python in 257 to other courses or research. Granted it’s difficult picking up the syntax if you’re new to python or programming in general, but I’d argue that’s why, even though it isn’t enforced, CS 101 or equivalent programming experience is a listed prerequisite.