STAT 3220

Let me start off by saying this course is not impossible. However, if you must take this class I urge you to pick a professor who is NOT Krista Varanyak. She is a young professor fresh out of grad school and it shows in her teaching methods. She assumes that students will know how to do things on SaS without giving any proper instruction. The format of her class is very disorganized and she is constantly changing the syllabus. In the beginning she gives you n SaS programming course to work on but it doesn't help you figure out SaS and really just becomes time-consuming. I wish I had dropped this class when I had the chance. One positive is that she doesn't give you exams, however the projects are so time-consuming and frustrating to work through that you are better off taking an exam. She makes the class much harder than it needs to be and makes you submit some form of assignment every single class, so it's not even like you could miss a class. It's too late to save myself, but I can still save those of you who haven't taken the class yet.

This class was a mess, to say the least. I am not being spiteful, as this feedback is coming from someone who will likely finish the class with a high A, possibly even an A+. Here it goes:

We are not in middle school. This class was taught as though we are a class of 6th graders who do not understand how to manage assignments or keep up with course material. Between Collab, Piazza, Gradescope, and daily email announcements, there is too much information coming at us that is completely unnecessary and draws students to start tuning everything out. Communications can and should be consolidated. Beginning with the quizzes, it seemed like they were more focused on definitions and memorization as opposed to problem-solving and critical thinking. There were 6 (!!) of them during the semester that just added a ton of stress and did not truly assess our ability to learn. We also had in-class assignments which were her way of taking attendance (15% of your final grade). These were absolutely worthless and made it so we had to come to class, even when listening to her lectures is pretty pointless. As for the problem sets, they were generally good but extremely repetitive. These can be cut down even further. My hand was sore after handwriting the first problem set, and having to write out the exact same 3-line interpretation, quite literally 30+ times. Type these out. Also, pretty much all of the answers were on Chegg, so do what you will with that info. In terms of labs, these were valuable, but need improvement in terms of execution. The main issue was that there was never enough time in class to finish the lab especially toward the beginning of the course. I would recommend removing the in-class assignments and replacing them with more time for each lab. Side note: On the lab with the football data from the eagles, there are points in the lab when you refer to 2017 data when it is from 2018 and vice versa (we looked up the team stats on google for each year to find this out). As for the projects, there are 2 and both done in a group (total of 45% of your final grade) so make sure to pick a good group. They're graded pretty easily but the second project has a "poster session" that involves a bunch of small and meaningless tasks (such as commenting on the projects of three other groups and responding to their comments) that are a waste of everyone's time.

There are also a bunch of extra credit assignments that require a lot of time for a maximum 1% boost to your final grade. Grading wise the class is fine, but the main point of this review is that this class was so poorly organized that it made me consider dropping a statistics major. If you do the work (assuming you manage to figure out what the hell is actually going on and sift through the bullshit in her emails), your grade will be fine. It will just take a lot out of you.

If you do not have to take this class, DO NOT take it while it is taught by Krista Varanyak. I do not think she did a good job at getting students to understand what she intended to. During class, most students get sleepy, and even though we tried our best to keep up with her, we still get lost in her vague instruction towards in-class activity and so on... The professor also responses to e-mails so slow that you could never get your questions answered on time. I know I might be a little bit emotional but I have to say this course is the worst course I have taken so far.

Talk about a course that is much worse than it should be. Regression Analysis is actually a relatively interesting, important and easy-to-interpret topic compared to many other statistics courses. Unfortunately, Krista drags us through a crap load of repetitive busy work. The daily check-ins are obnoxious. On top of the projects, long assignments and labs, they seem like her way of forcing students to engage in her vague lectures. You can tell she doesn't have a great understanding of the content. Literally, everything takes more time than it should. Even her collab page feels like it's designed to waste time. Thanks for making multiple folders with the same title! I almost forgot to mention that she casually assigns an online SAS course that takes ~20 hours to complete. TA's are chill at least and the grading is lenient. I simply can't get past the astronomically high effort-to-knowledge ratio.

Didn't learn a ton, but this might be the first class I get an A+ in. The class is structured into 5 units which each have a lab (done in class with a partner) and a problem set. There were no exams, just 2 group projects that matched up with the course material well and if you got a good group then they were not much effort at all. You are programming in SAS which can get annoying especially since I have a CS background and SAS doesn't actually feel like coding more like just calculating. There is a SAS course that you have to complete but she walks you through all the code you need to know how to use in class so the SAS course isn't necessary to understand the material or pass the class. The structure of the class was kind of confusing since some days were mandatory and others weren't but the in-class lectures were much more helpful than the recorded lectures since she went through the code in class and the recorded lectures was just going through the slides. Most of the code you can copy and paste from her examples and change the name of the data set and it'll work. Don't be intimidated if you've never coded before. If you're a stat major, it's not bad but if you don't have to take it, I wouldn't.

I took this fall 2020 online as a first year. DON'T let the reviews scare you into taking this class. This course is very manageable, just incredibly time consuming. I'm convinced Krista does not realize the amount of work she gives is excessive and believes this is our only class. However, that aside, it's not that bad and easy to pass with an A+ so long as you do the work.

There's a pre-recorded lecture to go along with the reading prior to each class. The pre-recorded lecture is based on her power points and technically you don't really need to read the textbook to understand the material. In the live lectures, she goes over a class example and the codes on SAS. Her coding files for each unit are actually organized and easy to sort through. There's a class check-in with each lecture that's normally content-based or asks you to do your own example. Not hard at all. You can find the answers to the content based questions in her power points or you can just ask her and she'll guide you to the answer.

There's one homework assignment with each unit (about 4 problems with each assignment) along with a lab. They're both very helpful in preparing for the other if you choose to do one before the other. For the labs, she randomly pairs you up with someone to work on it and if you and your partner both understand the codes/content, it doesn't take more than 2 hours to finish the lab. For the home work, it does take long but it can be done in a night. It's not hard at all to get above a 90/100 on each lab and homework.

My main complaints with Prof. Varanyak is that it's very obvious she's still kind of new to teaching (she graduated from grad school only a few years ago). She sends a bunch of bs emails and rarely replies to Piazza posts that are genuine questions. The TAs are the ones that reply to the Piazza posts but they give very conflicting answers most of the time so it doesn't even help. It's obvious that she's very disorganized - even in her pre-recorded lectures she somehow manages to find an error in her power point and fixes it on the spot. Sometimes she'll upload the wrong files and and re-upload the correct ones without letting anyone know. She doesn't even follow her own schedule that she set up and shared earlier with us sometimes either.

I'm glad that there aren't any exams in this class. There's two projects but they're SO time-consuming and you have to make sure you get GOOD project partners. If someone isn't doing their part, just report them right away. I was forced to do that with one of my partners. We were initially a group of three but became two since of them obviously didn't understand the material. My biggest piece of advice is to take this class with friends. It helps a lot!!!!!!!! #tCF2020

Honestly this class was amazing, I know this class had such a bad rep from the earlier years, but it is much more organized now. Krista is honestly one of my favorite teachers from UVA and she was so approachable and caring to all the students. Since I took this during J-term, the class size was smaller, but it so doable and I HIGHLY recommend her since she was always available and thoughtful.

Honestly very surprised to see how negative a lot of the reviews about Krista are, as I had a great experience with her. I took this class over j term so obviously it was at a much faster pace/a little more strenuous than it would be during a normal semester. That said I think Krista did a great job. I thought her lectures and powerpoints were super easy to understand and look back at. Also think that the classworks, labs, and homeworks were completely reasonable and actually helped with learning. Krista is super nice and very approachable and I think made the class a really good experience. I would say this is one of the best stat classes I've taken at UVA and would 100% take a class with Krista again. Not sure why other people dislike her, but I think if you put in a reasonable amount of time and effort the class isn't that difficult and you actually can get a lot out of it.

Horrible teacher. Krista literally sucks. She's not remotely helpful in OH. The way she presents it is so boring. The readings are bearable I suppose. She makes you use SAS, which is really confusing and somewhat hard to use. I got an A-, so I'm not complaining just bc of my grade. I would've had a more enjoyable time if I took it with someone else. Do yourself a favor and don't make the mistake I did. Everyone else here seems to agree, so that should say something.

If you love stats, then go ahead and take this class. I realized that I only thought I liked this class due to the professor in intro, not because of the content itself.

I personally don't like Krista that much, but this class is generally ok. You can easily get A in this class but you won't learn much about the core concepts or the coding. Krista is nice but not a very good teacher for high level classes. She poorly explains the rationales behind concepts and the codes. You will just memorize the whatever things you need to do and correspond them with the codes, while you don't understand why you do this. Another thing is that the class is not organized at all. It has the most disorganized Collab site I have ever seen. It is very confusing with her repeated labels, tedious and not accurate instructions, and redundant resources. She could make it better by keeping the "lecture day tab" and eliminating others because they don't help at all. Homework, classwork, labs and projects take up the grade, but homework problems are not designed very well. Her wording sometimes is difficult to understand (i.e. she uses multiple terms/names to represent the same thing which is confusing ), and also expect a few questions that you never learned in class to appear in HW or lab. She gave different answers to the same type of questions, so you don't clearly know what is the right (or standard) way to do it. Besides the HW, classwork, recorded lectures and stuff, you also have the self-learning SAS lessons which costs you 2 hours per week. On the good side, the classwork is helpful as an immediate practice for what you need to know. She will give answers at the end of the class, so don't miss it. Overall, this class is ok but don't choose Krista if you want some in-depth understanding of the materials. Good GPA pumper.