ANTH 1010

This was without a doubt the worst class I have ever taken in my life. Take anthropology with LITERALLY any professor except Mills. This was her first semester at UVA and I wish I would have looked up her reviews at JMU (which were 1/5 stars) to avoid this class. Introductory anthropology is not supposed to be a difficult course. Mills taught it with upper-level expectations. Every lecture was extremely abstract and hard to follow. She would spend the whole hour talking about like one example that didn't relate to the content. Her slides were just massive paragraphs taken from the readings. The readings were often extremely dense and could be 40 pages of a fieldwork research report. On multiple occasions she changed the readings the night before discussions sessions and lecture. She also randomly assigned two hour documentaries that she expected us to watch on top of readings. We had five "fieldwork assignments" for the year that she took forever to grade, graded harshly, and NEVER gave any feedback for improvement. There were two rubrics for the fieldwork assignments and it was never clear which one she was using. She never specified the edition of the book we were supposed to use and then gave out chapter numbers as readings (without titles) that corresponded to completely different sections in the 2017 and 2020 editions of the textbook. The exams were also incredibly difficult. They consisted of 5 essay questions and 5 multiple choice questions. After telling us there would be no specific names of anthropologists on the exam, the second question was about specific anthropologists. The weighting on the exam was so off that if you did perfectly on the 5 essays you could still potentially get an 80 because each multiple choice question was worth 4% of the test grade!! And they were A, B, C, A&B, B&C, or all of the above style questions. No curve. She was also difficult to communicate with. I can not discourage you from taking this class enough. It will not be the "easy A" intro anthropology you expect. Please do yourself the favor and take it with another professor.