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 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Really don't think the content in this class is that tough, but it's just taught so poorly. Not completely her fault because its tough to teach math on lecture slides. She just reads the slides and does some excel examples, which won't help on the test because we don't have excel for tests. Tests aren't easy because they try and trip you up with small details, which make you need to read everything carefully. Also, tests are multiple choice, so no partial credit, which can be a killer if you make small mistakes, you will lose all the points. Don't take unless you really love Stat or a prereq.

Really difficult class, exams are especially hard. Teacher shows us how to do things on excel, but we can only use our calculators on the exams, they don't show you how to use calculator (have to look up online). Labs and Hw aren't too bad, but study a lot for the exams. Don't take unless you need it as a comm pre-req or are really into statistics, and if you take it as a comm pre-req I recommend taking it in the spring of your second year.

Professor Martinet is not a good lecturer. She reads off the slides and does most of her examples on Excel, which is useless since on the test we use calculators. For the two midterms we had, the mean was in the 70s. The textbook is also very difficult to understand and digest while the labs are irrelevant. It's not horribly difficult, but it's definitely not a class I would like to take again.