STAT 3130

This class was really focused on the theory and statstical side of survey design rather than practical application like I was expecting when I enrolled. The most time consuming part of this class were the lab and homework assignments. If you have to take this class, I recommend you start these assignments early and make friends who you can ask questions of. The course structure was the most complex of any other class I've taken, so paying attention to the course calendar is really important. At the beginning of the semester, I was pretty overwhelmed and that was reflected in my grades. I turned it around when I actually paid attention in class (surprise, surprise) which was easier said than done because he just lectures during most classes. Be sure to take notes, especially during his numerical examples, because it helps you understand what he wants you to know for the exams. I appreciated that each exam was only 10% of my grade, too. Overall, I wasn't a huge fan of the structure of the class and there were some concepts that I truly didn't understand. However, if you work with your group and go to office hours (I didn't ever do this, but it would have probably helped), you can do it! I ended up with an A- because of how he curves. #tCFF23

To me, this course was not helpful in teaching me anything. It was a semester-long exercise in frustration and wasting time. I would seriously recommend that you avoid this class at all costs and only take it if you absolutely have to for whatever reason.
1. Lecture does not provide any value. I attended every lecture that I possibly could and never walked away feeling like I had gained anything. More often than not, lectures consisted of seemingly random equations being written on the board, or the instructor talking in circles. He lectured as if he were speaking to professionals, rather than students. My most common issue was that his lectures assumed I had some highly developed foundation of knowledge that I actually did not have, and was counting on him to teach.
2. The structure of office hours made them almost completely inaccessible. They were structured so that each student may book a time slot. However the issue was that the slots were only 15 minutes each, which in my experience is rarely enough time to have my questions answered. Additionally, he offered very few appointments, and they would fill up far in advance. Often I would start a homework several days before the due date, have a question, check his office hours appointments, and see that there was no available appointment for another week or more.
3. The homeworks were unhelpful as well. Rather than reinforce the material in a constructive way, the homeworks simply required us to copy and paste the code from his examples and change the numbers to match the question. There were numerous times throughout the semester where I found myself wondering what the point of the assignment was as I scanned back and forth from two different screens, making sure that my numbers matched the numbers in his example answers. They were not difficult to do well on, but they also did not require any understanding of the material.
4. The structure of labs was very frustrating. If you have a bad group that does not take initiative, you are absolutely screwed. Labs are essentially glorified homework assignments, albeit they did focus a little bit more on the concepts. The issue was that the grading was so harsh that it was basically overkill. These assignments were very difficult to do well on, and dragged my grade down significantly. Exams and homeworks had this issue as well. Minor mistakes resulted in ridiculous loss of points.
5. The course structure as a whole was needlessly complicated and frustrating. The course has seven different grading categories, and each class is a different type of lecture, or a group activity, or something else that was unhelpful. Every assignment or activity that he gave us required him to give instructions for at least 10 minutes, or give several pages of written instructions, because they were so needlessly complicated that no one could understand what to do.

I was not frustrated with the course because it was difficult, I was frustrated because it felt like being graded on jumping through hoops rather than my understanding of the material. I feel bad that I spent a semester struggling in this course and I have come away from it being unable to describe pretty much any of the major concepts in my own words. It feels like a waste of time and money for the credit hours, and it will probably be my worst grade in four years of college on top of all that. I truly believe that this course needs a major overhaul and should not be taught again until someone in power steps in and makes that happen. To the credit of prof Spitzner, from all my interactions with him it seemed like he was a very kind person and was enthusiastic about the material. He was just unable to design and teach an effective course.

This is a class in copying and pasting code. Professor Spitzner thinks that he is employing advanced pedagogical theory, but he is actually just crafting the most obnoxious, overdeveloped course in existence. He constantly deceives himself about the good faith of his students by legitimizing their responses to tedious self-assessment and peer grading assignments that are clearly filled out hastily by students who rarely actually read the questions. Lectures cycle among useless recapitulations of textbook readings, useless tours through R code, and useless small-group discussions. He divides assignments between "Assignments" and "Tests & Quizzes" sections of Collab so that both tabs have to be checked. He makes it so that assignments in the "Tests & Quizzes" tab do not disappear once they have been taken so that it is difficult to find whether you have submitted an assignment. Professor Spitzner divides lab assignments into "computational" and "analytical" sections as if he is Kant elucidating the analytic–synthetic distinction. He wasted tons of time by repeatedly reassigning groups during the add/drop period. Homework assignments demanded no thinking about the course topics, but instead required tedious replication of example code in which typing one number incorrectly could yield a "wrong" answer that received no credit.
Professor Spitzner continued this barrage of number-punching into tests, where we were expected to copy numbers perfectly from each test into auspicious R code that he had written. Professor Spitzner seems like a nice guy, and I almost believe that he actually wants to make his students learn; if this is the case, then he needs to pivot this course away from the tedium of solving the same problems multiple times, but with different numbers. No student is internalizing concepts in statistics by plug-and-chugging like it's the statistics unit in high school Algebra I. I feel bad taking the time to write this, as I am confident that, even if anyone reads this review, none of my criticisms will be recognized; I cannot imagine that Professor Spitzner has been teaching so poorly for so long while also reading course evaluations like this one.

Avoid this class at all cost. Dr. Spitler is more interested in forming a pretty grade distribution than teaching students. When shown that his exam questions were erroneous he said tough luck. When told that group project teams were dysfunctional he made the problem worse by allowing students to submit work independently rather than switch teams. He deliberately devised a complicated grading formula so he could tell students they were losing only a few points when really they were losing dozens. Take any other class.

Overall, I feel like there's nothing I could've done in this class to increase my grade.
Professor Spitzner is pretty generous with exam curves (3 of them, each 10% of your grade), but the exams ask hyper-specific questions such that only the person, with all the time in the world to perfectly memorize the textbook, could do well on. They are open-note, open-resource, but timed.
The homeworks (7 assignments, total 23% of your semester grade) were problems that built off of each other, and were done via Collab, so if you missed the first part of a problem, then you can kiss your grade goodbye. Get ready to waste a lot of time on these. He would never post guided solutions after they were due, but would post another set of the problems with different numbers beforehand, and post only the answers. I don't like this, as I really don't know what I did wrong, when I did do stuff wrong. The good news is that most of the answers are very similar to R code he provides, so I went through the R code a lot.
He also gave out "labs" (6 of them, 23% of your grade) which you were to complete outside of class. These could range from problems that could be solved in 30 minutes to problems that you need a PhD to solve. He was extremely nitpicky with these too, docking for even the smallest of mistakes.
There's also "readings" which is a free 9% of your grade. He gives out surveys that are extremely long, and I ended up just clicking through (you'd think he'd know how to design a survey in a class on survey analysis).
Lastly, there's a project worth 15% of your grade. It's pretty much the only easy-A part of the course, as if your presentation follows the rubric well and you can explain every slide, you'll do very well.
He never drops assignments, but he gives an extremely small curve on the labs and homeworks, so if you have a bad grade on one of these assignments, it'll reflect in your final grade.

Now, the professor himself. I feel like this class would be a lot better if Professor Spitzner wasn't teaching it. He never really made class worth going to, either droning through some R code, or regurgitating textbook information. He sounds like a nice person, which is maybe his one positive trait. He also said that he wanted to emphasize a theoretical aspect to the course, rather than repeating equations over and over. Refer to the homeworks.

Overall, I do not recommend, as this class is unnecessarily difficult.

Do not take this class. You put in countless hours of work on labs and homework sets, and end up learning nothing. Professor Spitzner is not very willing to help struggling students in office hours even though he portrays himself as approachable and willing to help.

Great class and great professor. Spitzner really wanted the class to learn and made every class useful. The textbook is decent but the slides and lectures are more important for the exams. Exams and grading are very fair and the final project is actually pretty fun. Would highly recommend.