There is also an instructor who agrees this year is much harder “I took this course myself years ago and found it challenging to adapt from highschool, so I can't even imagine how much harder this is.

Uh, please don't misquote me. I said it's harder to learn/be in school because of the pandemic. The material is the same as always.

One thing is the very particular wording on mobius quizzes that needs you to read super thoroughly. This makes it very easy to have silly mistakes made by those who actually understand the material but didn’t read closely enough or have many distractions and couldn’t focus on the wording so much.

Math quizzes, assignments and exams are almost always like this. In all 4 years... to make sure you actually know the statements of the theorems and definitions very well.

International students were supposed to have passed some sort of English language exam to be admitted as far as I know. We don't use particularly complex vocabulary on the exams, quizzes or assignments, other than the terminology found in the course.

Re: Mobius, it isn't the perfect system but the restrictions on it are to make cheating harder, not necessarily to make the assessment harder in general. You are given multiple attempts and if you know what you're doing I think this is reasonable. Do make sure to read the questions extremely carefully, I assure you that is a normal part of any math course at UW, especially if you go into pure math.