STAT 3220

I thought the professor was great, probably my favorite this semester. Although I probably seemed aloof in class, I appreciated her enthusiasm for the content and her "jokes" such as "My office hours are moved to Friday...not like anyone shows up anyway". Her miniprojects are actually quite fun to do and seem very practical. She started the semester asking students to tell her if they get too stressed which is also something I appreciated. She also offers to give advice about jobs, graduate school, etc. Overall, she's a professor who seems to care not only about teaching students, but also their wellbeing.

I personally wasn't a very big fan of Krista. She wasn't that great of a lecturer and didn't seem that knowledgeable about the subject. Most of the material I ended up learning on my own time. The homeworks were very time consuming, as well as the group projects. On the plus side, she offered plenty of extra credit, and overall the grades were really good for this class. But, I think she's also restructuring the course for the next school year, so I'm not sure how that'll work out. The material in general is pretty useful, but I'd recommend taking the class with another teacher if possible.

Honestly, Krista is trying. Was she an amazing professor who I'll remember shaped my career? No, absolutely not -- but she's trying. The class was incredibly structured in the sense of homeworks, mini projects, and material. The exams on the other hand. She gave us an open-note midterm (somehow I still did terribly on that) and then changed our open-note final to a huge final project. In the end, the final project ended up saving my grade but she assigned it very impulsively and I don't know if she's going to implement it next semester. She teaches straight from the textbook, and homework is also straight from the textbook so definitely have that. The homework is tiring and long, it wears your spirit down so definitely try to get a hold of a Chegg account in some way, shape, or form. Also, I would recommend taking this class with friends because when you do mini-projects/homeworks, having someone to check your numbers and analysis with is extremely helpful. There is a mini-project due for every chapter and you're assigned a group for the first like 3 or 4, and then you get to pick your group. MAKE SURE YOU PICK A GOOD GROUP. The second half of mini-projects is significantly harder than the first half and if you have a terrible group then it's going to be hard. The hype part about this class is all the extra credit Krista gives out for going to talks and writing reflections -- take full advantage of all extra credit opportunities, they saved my grade. Learning SAS was fun, and you apply it a lot but a lot of it is copying and altering bits of her code that she posts. It might have been cool to do an independent SAS project to learn more skills in SAS because I feel like we barely scratched the surface, but I liked what I did learn. Material isn't too hard either, just read the textbook.

Krista is one of the worst professors I've ever had in UVA. She assigns tons of unnecessary homework every week and doesn't even talk about any homework during class. Won't take another class with her ever again.

Great course! Ms.V is very approachable after class or during office hours. She will try her best to answer the questions. The projects have clear guidelines and are usually associated with daily matters, which is great. Make sure to ask her opinion if any obstacles arise during data analysis. She will help you out!

Not a fan of Krista. She is an extremely bad lecturer and does not really care about her students or the material. She takes forever to grade HWs and assigns an unnecessary amount of work to students for no reason. Also, on our first open note exam, she took off 10% for my answer sounding too similar to the textbook. I really don't know why, how that came up to her mind. There is no structure to her grading and often very subjective. Her cutoff for A in the class is 95%. Like why? Why do you hate us so much?

Very meh...
Tons of annoying little case studies. Crappy final project. Scrolling through SAS code does not count as lecture just as showing us pictures of Japanese text does not teach us Japanese. Also, I don't know if she's just bad at SAS, but it seems like you need to write Harry Potter books 5-7 worth of SAS to produce the same output a few lines of R can produce.

Honestly some of these reviews are obviously from students who didnt show up to lecture or put in the necessary work. Not to sound like a smart-ass, but honestly the course wasn't bad at all. As a first year, I was nervous to jump into a 3000 level course my first semester, but honestly this course was so interesting that I have few regrets. I agree that the case studies (4 mini projects worth 20% of your grade) and homework (6 assignments worth 25% of your grade) could be a bit tedious, but they were graded pretty fairly-- the case studies were graded by her and were generally pretty easy to get an A on, the homeworks however took a while to be graded and seemed to be graded sort of subjectively-- probably my only critique of the course. Our first exam was open book and online, plus had 10 possible extra credit points... how people managed to not get an A honestly surprised me because the subject matter was not very difficult. In this course, you will have to get familiar with coding in SAS, something that scared me because I had little coding experience. However (contrary to what many people seem to be saying) she presented it in a relatively easy-to-follow manor, and even released her own solutions to the practice problems involving SAS so we could go over it after lecture... honestly seemed pretty nice. If you keep up with the coding as you go, it won't be hard. Honestly, if you remember proc reg you'll be fine lol. Overall, I would recommend taking this course. It introduces some really interesting regression topics and opens your eyes to the wider world of statistics.

I could say that people who rate this course a low score because they did not put in much effort and still want an easy A. Professor Varanyak is helpful in office hours. I admit that there are 4 case studies during the semester and a final project. But the exam are open-book and she reviewed some important questions that may be shown on the exam with us. So, I say it is hard for you to not get a 90/100 higher on exams. As I knew so far, she tries to change her syllabus and make this course more interesting and less hard for students. A cutoff is 95%, but she gives extra credit for finishing course evaluation. For the Fall 2018 semester, the A is actually 93%. If you put in effort on your group case studies and write well notes for exams, you at least will get an A-. I believed most of our class was A.

Previous reviews of this course made me very fearful of Krista's teaching, but she really exceeded my expectations. She tries her very best to make a sometimes dull subject interesting, and quite frankly I really like her. She is very helpful and extremely fair. Honestly, this class is really easy because Krista really wants everyone to succeed. I never read the textbook and found that I could be successful by just attending lectures. The HW sets are also very helpful, especially with regard to how to use SAS. The two exams are pretty easy because she gives you practice for them and you can use a cheat sheet. Additionally, she grades the projects very leniently. Overall, I would recommend this course to anyone with any interest in statistics/economics/business/any field that is highly quantitative/analytical because it is easy and the material taught is extremely applicable to the real world.