STAT 4170

Unless this class is relevant to your program, I would avoid this class. Woo knows his stuff, but he's a hard grader and sets his class up in a way that forces you to go out of your way to succeed in his class. In other words, he makes you work for it. The material isn't insanely difficult, so try to get an earlier section if possible to be more awake for the worked examples. Go to both review sessions (the first one's usually better), and remember that the first midterm is always the hardest. . . gets easier from there.

If Woo is reading this, I think the course would benefit from less quiz drops and instead more leniency on potential partial credit on midterms. This would make midterm and course knowledge progress feel more rewarding rather than worrying about 100% correctness.

This class has been pretty hard from the get go, the material is very math heavy even though we are able to do majority of the work on R. Overall, the professor is great but the subject is very tedious. Only take this class if you need it for your major.

I would say this is one of the most fulfilling classes I've taken at UVA. The content is very interesting but admittedly pretty difficult to wrap your head around at the beginning. However, Jeffrey Woo does a great job as a professor teaching the content in a manner where you're truly able to understand the concepts instead of just memorizing formulas. Your grade is composed of Lecture Quizzes (he walks through them), HWs (provides plenty of worked examples), and 3 midterms that I thought were very fair. The midterms didn't include anything that hadn't been covered before in class and Woo allows his students to bring a handwritten notes sheet so you don't have to worry about memorizing formulas.

The class content is split between mathematical calculations/proofs by hand and statistical analysis in R which makes it unique compared to other stat/math classes. The analysis portion of the class is super interesting and digestible, Woo does a great job explaining all of the different concepts related to time series as a whole and makes it easy to follow along. The math side of the class can come off as daunting at first, mostly due to the large amount of new concepts and greek letters, but it starts to click pretty quickly if you go to lecture. The difficulty of this course doesn't come from the calculations themselves which are really just lots of algebra, but rather from a new format of math you've probably never seen before.

Overall, I think this class is very manageable and taught extremely well, but you will need to put in a little bit of time on your own especially before exams if you want to do well.

I cannot recommend this course enough. In a department that is lacking good professors, Prof. Woo is a breath of fresh air. This is the most organized and fair class I have taken at UVA, and anyone who is saying different was not willing to put the work in for this class. That being said, this class is going to require some studying and a couple hours for each homework, but I would say that the workload is about average.

Midterms are going to have questions like the homework, but nothing unfair or too difficult. Prof. Woo allows you to work with classmates on homework, which I believe is super useful. His office hours are very helpful as well if you are having any problems with the homework, which sometimes takes some work. This class was so great that I am going out of my way to take another class with Professor Woo next semester, and I would highly recommend his classes.

This course has some tough content and is much more about statistical/mathematical proofs rather than finance/investing. Personally, I though Prof. Woo was great and one of the BEST lecturers in the Stat department. Prof. Woo adequately reviews course concepts and answers any questions that students have. His lectures also flow into the content on homework assignments. The exams are a little tough but manageable, they ultimately mirror the homeworks. Lecturer is required to do well in this class and Prof. Woo goes FAST.