This class was my least favorite by far. Having never taken statistics before, the material was confusing from the start and Martinet had a "this should be pretty obvious" attitude which didn't help. I had to learn literally everything by myself. Lab was a pain and my TA graded far harder than the others did, which hurt since Martinet assumed lab would boost our grade (my group got a C+ on the stat study). Test averages were usually around 70%. At the end of the course I ended up with an A- due to a pretty decent curve (who knows how she applied it though, since she never said anything about it).

Statistics SHOULD be a relatively straightforward class. After all, you're just dealing with numbers and averages- numbers don't lie, right? WRONG. This class is the mother of all of those tricky, bitchy classes that you have to carefully navigate through during the semester if you want to even have hope of finishing with a good grade. It certainly is the Comm School weedout for host of reasons. First of all, Gretchen was a pretty bad lecturer, mostly reading off of PowerPoints 90% of the time- someone who went to class wouldn't have much of a better clue of what the hell was going on than someone who didn't. The labs are set up pretty horribly and extremely confusing- not to mention I had a TA who couldn't even speak English right (Bo Yang). The homeworks are hard to do because you don't really have any idea of what's going on in the first place, so you have to BS your way through most of it. Finally, the tests are literally designed to trick you- it seems as if every other question is a trick question. Don't take this course unless you need to. You have been warned.

Martinet gets a bad rap mainly because the class is difficult (which is because it is a weed out for the COMM school), but she really isn't that bad. The test are going to be ridiculously hard with whatever teacher even if you understand the material. Overall I would not take this class if you don't have to for COMM school because it is not fun and pretty hard.

I actually really liked Professor Martinet. She was laid back, helpful, and willing to work with her students with whatever issues arose. Her lectures weren't the easiest way to learn statistics, but I think that she did as good of a job as anyone could have in a stat lecture. You don't need to read the textbook - just go over her powerpoints - and do all the assignments and you're good. Her grading is pretty lenient as well, which makes up for the difficulty of the exams.

So, Professor Martinet is very nice who clearly means the best for her students, and effectively gives us a lot of work in an attempt to make us understand the material in addition to padding our grade. In essence, she wants us to earn our curve, and that is something that I don't want to particularly complain about. Both the homework and the labs help to understand the material, yet, for some indescribable reason, something strange happens on the tests. One could be getting hundreds in the labs and homework, yet have inordinate difficulty on the test. It's just something that has to "click" with people and the problem just falls into place. She teaches all the material, but, for some reason, the test never seem to reflect what I imagine is a fair number's ability in being able to actually do the material. Could be worse, but could also be a lot better

Prof. Martinet is a nice lady, but OMG she is a very bad professor!
She just reads her slides and stands there for an hour, then after showing easy examples she asks if anyone has questions. Later on her labs have no meaning other than just to sit there and fill out easy information and get credit for it.
However, when tests come around shit gets hard really fast real quick. The questions make you wonder if its introduction in statistics or not. Furthermore, the average for the tests are in the D range and no curve because apparently easy homework and labs are supposed to work as a curve.
I honestly think that she means no ill, but her logic of teaching has many flaws. She expects you to catch on all of material on your own. Overall, avoid this class at all costs unless you really have to take it, and even if you do take it with some one else.

Listen to me carefully. Martinet is a very nice lady who tries, but unfortunately for her, she fails, miserably. She literally stands there and reads the slides (which are available on collab) making coming to class almost pointless. However, she does Learning Catalytics so you may want to come to class... Or, you can stay home and do it seeing that the answers are relatively easy usually. The textbook saved me, cause I actually read it, which was the only way I passed.. With a C+. The labs were not very difficult in my opinion, however they did take me about 1-5 hours sometimes. The homework is relatively easy, but not so much so, but you get like 30 attempts per question. Now here is my problem with the class. It's a severe case of "In class: 1+1=2... On exam: Johnny has four apples and gives away 1, calculate the mass of the sun". NOTHING you do in class is even slightly reflective of the exams. The questions are very tricky, and the exam is takes some time to do. Also she thinks she doing us a favor by giving us a formula sheet, however we use excel for basically everything besides exams, and she doesn't teach us calculator functions, so you have to use the ones on the formula sheet... And that's IF you know which formula is for what. There is also a lot of useless information to throw you off as well. I do not recommend this class. The average for the final was a 67. The lowest grade was a 25. Highest 100 (people who probably took over the class). Please stay away.

Before I start railing this class overall, I want to say that I think Professor Martinet is a very nice lady, who does try to seem accessible to students and has been very courteous when I emailed her with questions about the class.

That said, this class is truly dreadful. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for a few different reasons. Honestly, the main sticking point for me was the fact that the exams were absolutely nothing like any of the work that she gives you throughout the semester. And trust me, I did plenty of work throughout the semester as it was.

The homework was annoying, but is helpful because it does basically require you to learn the material. I liked this, sort of. The cool part of the homework is that she gives you thirty attempts for usually 15-17 of the 20 problems assigned! And, typically, if you still can't get it, she'll give you more attempts. This is really helpful too as most of these problems have multiple parts to them and it will show you which part is right and will give you partial credit! The problem lies in those other 3-5 problems. The things that were cool about the other problems don't exist with these. You get four attempts, which is admittedly fair for the usual multiple choice/TF questions that they are. But there is no partial credit, and it won't tell you if you got them right or not. Not to mention that on many occasions I spotted some questions that blatantly contradicted the notes. That's annoying as sin. Luckily, Martinet drops 2 of the 12 homework grades, so it is a little forgiving.

Next are the labs. My Statistical Study group was quite fantastic, I must say. I really enjoyed my other two partners as they were very competent and really helped me understand the material sometimes (my lecture was a day behind theirs). Really cool people. We ended up getting great grades for the work that we did together, and I felt that this was a really satisfying part of the course. However, my TA was not. Heather Cook was a mixed bag. I do think she cared but I think everyone got a really bad feeling about her at the beginning. It was mostly little stuff, but I felt uncomfortable with my grades with her. There were several occasions where the grades on my papers didn't match what was on Collab, and that's a really scary thought at the end of the semester when you're not getting the paper submissions back anymore.

The individual labs were very difficult, I thought. They typically took me about 4-7 hours to do overall, and I think that's a bit overkill.

Learning Catalytics was fine. Also, it appears that a lot of people did start skipping because Martinet changed the grading scale for that part of the final grade. The Learning Catalytics part was fair, albeit a tad bit useless.

Also, as I said before, the exams were ungodly hard at times. The final was especially hard. Honestly, even after I did every homework set and did every lab, I didn't have a clue what I was doing on the final even though I should have already done everything throughout the course and gotten really good grades. I think this stems from the fact that Martinet specifically chooses to teach you to use Excel, and then takes it away on the tests. She gives you the functions in the back, but then gives you a bunch of distractor functions as well. That's not fair in the slightest. If it says anything, the average for the final exam was a 67.

I think I've said enough. Overall, if a friend asked me if I recommended this course, I would definitely say no. This class was awful.

This was easily the worst class I have ever taken. The material was somewhat interesting, but Martinet made it difficult to understand. For the most part, she just read off of her slides in her powerpoints, but when she would finally decide to provide her own explanations, her explanations were so convoluted that I wish she had just continued to read off of her slides. She told us to not worry about reading the textbook or doing practice problems from it because the book is useless (which would have been nice of her to tell us BEFORE we actually bought the book). The Learning Catalytics questions (these are just online interactive questions asked during the lectures) are pointless, but if you show up to every class and answer them, you're pretty much guaranteed a 100 percent for them. The only homework you get are weekly problem sets. These are really hard sometimes and the only way you can get help with them is if you post questions about the problem sets on the collab discussion boards or go to the TA help labs. Posting on the discussion board is useless because the TAs and Martinet don't have time to get back to you typically until after the problem sets are due. Your best bet is going to the help labs, but even these are pointless sometimes. I found one TA that was really good who could help me every Thursday night, but the rest of them were useless. I would recommend trying to get 100 percents on all of your homeworks because the exams are hard and you need all the points you can get. As for the exams, she posts practices exams about a week and half before the actual exams. The problem with this is that she does not provide worked-out solutions to the problems, so if you don't understand something, you can post on the discussion board (which is unreliable because your questions will not be answered in a timely manner), go to a help lab, or wait until the last lecture before the exam to ask questions. The last lecture before every exam is a Q&A style lecture, but there are a lot of questions and more often than not, I was not called on when I raised my hand in those lectures to ask questions. I tried going to her office hours twice about exam questions. The first time, it was so busy that she didn't have time to get to everyone. The second time, she seemed genuinely irritated that I was there. As for labs, they were just busy work. You'll have individual labs one day of the week and group project time the other day of the week during your scheduled lab times. As for the individual labs, try to get as high of a percentage as you can on them because these will boost your final grade. As for the group project, you will be conducting your own statistical study. This part isn't too time consuming or difficult if you're assigned to a good group. The final paper you turn in to your lab TA is a maximum of 10 pages, including graphs that you insert into your text, so the paper isn't actually all that long. The TAs in my lab were useless. The GTA who ran the class didn't speak English well at all, so it made it difficult to ask questions about individual labs or the statistical study. The lab was very unorganized and it felt like I was doing busy work most of the time. Overall, the class was much harder and much more boring than I thought it would be. The class average for the first exam was about an 83. The class average for the second exam was a 70. Martinet doesn't curve exams until the very end of the course when she sees everyone's final grades. I would not recommend taking this class with Martinet because she was boring and extremely unhelpful. And I would not recommend taking this course at all unless you want to apply to the commerce school or you have a genuine interest in statistics.

This will, hopefully, be the worst course I will ever take at UVa because I can't imagine anything being more awful than this. Avoid unless you need it for a major.