STAT 2120

Absolutely horrible class. The different components of the class do not correlate together. It's 100% possible to get 100% on the labs and homework (I did) and end up failing on the exams. The reason why is the test questions aren't anything like the examples during lecture, problems in homework and lab. The tests consist of twenty two or so MC questions that are all word problems. She never teaches you how to approach a problem or how to go about solving one of those trickily worded problems that are obviously designed to trip you up. And what's worse is she doesn't curve. Which make no sense in my opinion because everyone i know almost failed both midterms. Overall, poor lecturer, convoluted structure/design for the class, ridiculously difficult tests. Paul Diver does a review at the end of the semester and he's the BEST. Don't take unless it's a prereq or if you've taken AP Stat in high school. Although, I know a guy who got a 4 on the AP exam and took 2120 just for fun, and now he has a D.

Overall, I thought the class was pretty standard. If you put in the work, you'll see the results. Martinet makes herself accessible but you must take the initiative to visit her during office hours. During lectures she pretty much just read from the slides. They weren't terribly helpful but it's possible to get an A without reading the book.

Ehh. Statistics is hard, but useful. UVA has had trouble teaching this class, and I do not know what else I could have expected from Martinet. Her teaching consisted mostly of reading off PowerPoint slides and going through examples on a projector and on Excel. Grading was fair, if the exams were not. MC exams mean no partial credit, and it was hard to get a good grade on either midterm even if neither felt that hard. The final exam was unnecessarily difficult, though it did not seem to have adversely affected my average. Plus, low exam averages are balanced out by near perfect scores on HWs and labs. One problem I have with this class is that lectures, labs, and HW relies on Excel for completion, while only calculators are allowed on exams. This inconsistency resulted in having to take time before exams to figure out how to do everything on the calculator. Ultimately, this class is neither fun nor easy, but definitely worth taking. Average marks for Martinet.

Not a terrible teacher and I really liked her until she did not send out any information regarding how she graded the course in the end. For the first 2 midterms she sent out a distribution of the grades but for the final she did not send that out or did she bother to inform us if she curved the class or not.

This professor is the most retarded person I have seen in my life. Maybe so because she's pregnant. She does not have any knowledge in statistics. Her webworks are time consuming and boring. My TA was Heather Cook and she hated her job too.

This course is awful for a variety of reasons you should now going into it. The first is the nature of the class. It is incredibly boring as Martinet just reads off of the power point the whole time and never expands on anything and lectures in the same voice every time. The second is the structure of grading. Participation comes from answering questions online through a program called, "Learning Catalytics". This system means that the flow of the lecture is constantly interrupted which makes it even harder to focus on paying attention to the abysmally boring material. Exams compose the vast majority of your grade which is a big problem because of the way the exams are. They are 20 question multiple choice tests. This doesn't sound too bad, but because statistics is all about mathematical processes each question takes a long time to complete using very specific methods. Usually the determination of which method to use comes from the wording which is at best meant to trip you up and at worst inaccurate. For example a question might slip in the word "approximate" but then leave the exact probability as one of the answer choices, so if you pick the most correct answer you are still wrong. Make small mistakes here and there and you can very easily end up looking at a C (no curve). Despite the issues in the lecture the lab section is the worst part about this course. Lab is an absolute waste of many hours per week when you are forced to plug countless numbers into spreadsheets for a grade. One big factor is your TA. My TA (Heather Cook) was apathetic and rude. She lazed about in a chair while we all worked and when we asked her a question on the lab or the material the most likely response was, "I don't know" or "Figure it out yourself". She also passed on the grading of our work to someone else, so she was literally no help when you had questions about your previous labs. It is most unfortunate that hundreds of students every year are forced to take this class for comm or econ as it really is dreadful. Do your best to avoid this class!

People are too critical of this class and especially Professor Martinet. The course is difficult, but Professor Martinet is very kind and really does try to help students. She is very generous with her time and very responsive to student feedback. Her lectures certainly aren't the most exciting, but she does make an effort to incorporate real life examples and responds to all student questions. Overall, still a challenging class, but if you have to take it, I would recommend Martinet.

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.

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.

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.