SYS 3023

This course is probably the worst class I have ever taken. The topics are so easy that one could literally spend a day and basically learn all these things by themselves. But, since this is the UVA School of Engineering and the professor is Greg Gerling, it will simply not be easy. Your grade in this class basically comes down to 4 group projects and 2 exams which comprise 85% of your grade (the other 15% are weekly submissions which are a completion grade so everyone gets 100). For the first 3 projects, he randomly assigns your group and for the last one you can pick. My group was actual trash for the first 3 and when I mentioned this to him he didn't do anything about it and laughed at me. Similarly, the exams in this class are very arbitrary and it is not uncommon to have a 10 point question on something he said once in lecture. He is the meanest, most arrogant person I know and does not want to help you do well. Every group assignment takes almost 25 hours to complete, with a lot of feedback in between. Yet, you always somehow end up doing bad on them because of his stupid grading. Worst class ever, I absolutely hated it. UI Design is a very interesting topic, but Gerling will make you hate it so quickly. If you want to go into UI design and are not a systems engineer, learn this by watching YouTube or take another class. For the love of God, UVA needs to do something about him. That's that.

This is a required course for Systems, so in that case, I would say that Gerling is probably a better bet than the other professors that teach the class.

Pros: This is a very useful course especially if you're interested in UX/UI design work post grad and its good to have Gerling on your side if you are thinking about doing a Human Factors application sequence. There is a lot of group work which I think is a benefit and there's no final exam so it takes some pressure off.

Cons: My main complaints center around how this class was graded. The grading is totally subjective so going to office hours is essentially useless. For example, I would see Gerling in office hours to get feedback on my interface, then still get a mediocre grade and when I brought it up to him (saying that he said he liked it in office hours) he said he trusted the opinion of the TA that graded it. That was very frustrating because he will preach the right and wrong way to design something but then he totally subjective in his grading. The exams are long and hard to study for because his lectures are pretty basic, and he put a 10 point multiple choice question on one of them.

Advice: DO NOT use red and green to symbolize good and bad because Gerling is colorblind and he will make it ALL about himself if you do.

Yeah this class sucks. Grading is entirely arbitrary, lectures/readings frequently don't cover material on assessments, and the weekly workload is either negligible or insanely difficult (like 20 hours in a week). Thank god for COVID CR/NC

This class is completely different than any other systems class required before. It is split equally between two - different professors with incredibly different teaching styles. The course consists of 1 exam (which is essentially a large homework set), 6 individual assignments and 3 group assignments. The exam average was a 95% and if you put forth decent effort you were almost guaranteed an A. The individual assignments were also graded fairly nicely and were easy to understand if you paid attention in class. I was cruising with a solid A in the course until the very end. The 3 group assignments are all part of 1 big project and you have the same groupmates for every task. Reason I bring this up is that if you get a not-great group it becomes a lot of work very fast dead smack in the middle of finals season. The professors grade the group assignments much more harshly and it is not nearly as easy as the rest of the course. Best advice for a group project is to get started early and stay in good communication. Otherwise one poor person ends up doing 20+ hours of work and that is just brutal, especially since part 2 is due the first weekend of finals and part 3 is due the 2nd week of finals.

This class is fine. Sometimes its really interesting and other times you are falling asleep. It was also at 9:30AM and attendance is required so that probably played a factor. This is not a hard class if you just stay on top of your work and turn everything in on time. As long as your projects are up to an acceptable level (which is not very hard to achieve) you will pass all of them and get an A in the course. Gerling is a nice guy who does know what he's talking about but the lectures are just hard to get excited about. The TA's were great this semester. #tCFF23

The course feels really arbitrary. The professor’s lectures expect you to treat every design principle like a religion and somehow read his mind for what he wants on the assignments. The instructions for these assignments are often vague and riddled with spelling mistakes or design issues, and if you interpret them differently than the professor intended, you're pretty much set up to fail. The grading system doesn’t help either — one mistake can derail your entire grade and its often just opinion-based grading. Some of the TAs aren’t very helpful, which just makes the whole situation worse.