PHIL 1750

This was a fantastic class--granted, there was some of dense reading material for homework, but the workload was manageable and the ideas that we read about and discussed were fascinating. Prof. Ott made the (sometimes quite complex) concepts accessible and engaging, and I would definitely recommend taking this course!

This was probably the class I enjoyed the most this semester. If you are interested in the topic of the course, lectures are insightful and enjoyable to attend. Dr. Ott has a pretty neat sense of human and presents the information very well, breaking down the more complex abstractions that we read about to a level where it was quite simple to understand. I would take another class from him if I got the chance. The exams and paper were extremely fair in their assessment of what we had covered in lecture, and the weekly response posts were normally pretty quick to do, although the readings for class could get rather dry. Additionally, my TA, Nikolina Cetic, was stellar. If you take a philosophy course and have the opportunity to do it with her as your TA, I would highly recommend it. She was an excellent teacher in section, and a fair grader. I always felt like I knew exactly what I needed to do to meet expectations for the class, which relieved the stress of ambiguity. I would highly recommend this course.

I really enjoyed the readings in this course, and Professor Ott gave some really interesting lectures. However, the grading system for the midterm and final was super unclear and a lot of students who knew the material fairly well ended up getting Cs and Ds. Ott capped the participation grade at a 90 (everyone starts with a B and can earn a 1/3 letter grade increase if they participate, so essentially a grade cap) and failed to mention that that was the system. He also capped an A at 95%, which just sucks when you're trying to make up for your subpar exam grades by writing a good paper. The grading was too harsh for an introductory level class, especially given that the material is philosophical and somewhat influenced by interpretation. However, if you're interested in getting an overview of Sartre, Nietzsche, Marx, and some other notables, I would recommend this class as it's an opportunity to talk about those guys.

There are some great Phil classes at UVA but this isn't one of them. Professor Ott gave interesting lectures and the workload was manageable but discussion was a boring waste of time. Participation grades were super poorly done and unfair and we were given no warning of that. My grade with all of the work in the class averaged to a 96 before participation but I was then given an 80 for participation, which, according to my TA James Reed was above average participation. The participation grade was decided after the end of the course and acted as a curve to lower the grades of Mr. Reed's section because the other TA had graded more harshly.

I took this course in Fall 2021, and it was moved to asynchronous online due to some scheduling mishap, but that honestly felt like a good format for the course - lectures were pre-recorded (2x a week), but discussion sessions were in-person. The lectures mostly covered the readings. I found some of the readings to be a bit dry and hard to follow, but they were generally reasonable length. The readings were meh, but the lectures and discussion sections were pretty interesting, and definitely made me consider a lot. The grade breakdown was 25% on weekly discussion posts (mostly just reflection on an idea from one of the readings and expanding on it), 15% participation, and 3 papers (weighted at 15%, 20%, and 25% for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, respectively). Once you got into the routine of the writing style they looked for, the posts and papers weren't too bad. However, they screwed people on the participation. All assignments are graded on a 4 point scale (4=A, 3=B, etc), and I had a high A average for the 85% of the grade excluding participation. But TAs were instructed to grade participation between 2.8-3.2 (so essentially a grade cap), yet this was never mentioned in lecture or the syllabus. So despite attending all lectures and discussion sessions and actively participating, your grade can take a hit because of "participation."