It had a different title but was "provide helpdesk support for Excel 2003 to businesspeople". What are the exact keystrokes required to change a background color of a cell or create a pivot table in Excel 2003, such that you could explain it over the phone to a non-technical person. Yeah... I get it... some of us grads would end up on a help desk and learning how to read a manual and explain parts of it to completely untrained people is a skill, and why not Excel? But I found it quite useless.

We had some intro to programming classes that presumed to teach non-programmers how to program in the sense of decompose and arrange a problem then re-encode it using an alternative language (assembly, C++, lisp/scheme...). By increasing the workload it operated as a filter not a learning experience. If you already had the knack and had been screwing around with BASIC and home computers since you were 6, it was an easy 'A' low labor class and if you entered the program without programming experience you would drown in the workload and flunk. Pointless. If you want an English degree they do not start the curriculum assuming someone who has never seen written language could get a degree, much like if you enter the math degree path they assume you can already count from 1 to 10 and do not falsely advertise that someone who can not count to ten at entry can later graduate the program. Just put in a pre-req that to enter the CS degree path you must already have written at least one successful piece of code and skip the "how to program" intro class.

Hey cobol programmers made bank on the Y2K thing, lets offer two semesters of cobol. Yeah, I took that because I already knew C++ and thought it would be fun to learn cobol. It was fun and interesting to poke around on an AS/400, but it was quite useless.

Assembly programming on a motorola 68hc11 microcontroller... The teacher didn't seem to know if he was teaching "lets learn how to program" or "assembly techniques and strategies in general" or "lets just memorize the programmers model of the 68hc11 processor so at least you know one typical machine model and learning your second will be easier". The first part was useless to me, the second was shortchanged and not enough, and the latter part was useless both then and now.