This was university maths, in that it was maths, and you were at university, but in terms of the syllabus it was pretty much later secondary school standard, and there was very little emphasis that I can recall on preparing people for further study of maths. So no proving anything. Just telling you how stuff worked, and then a zillion exercises for you to do to try to make it stick.
But SFU (a not so bad University in Canada), - Calculus 151 in Images theater, and Calculus 152. I recall the workload in those two courses very, very distinctly. Both first year courses. In hindsight, I think they served the purpose of filtering out students who weren't prepared to work hard...
I just want to make sure the undergraduate instructors reading this thread realize that doing this on the sly in a standard problem set would be a very, very bad idea. Not cool.
I don't see it!
Not being facetious or judgmental either. And there's strong pressure for calc profs these days to not assign more than 30 problems a week. Sensitivity about workload is very high at many institutions.
That's the context in which being thrown a heretofore unsolved problem in calculus is not particularly amusing for an undergraduate.