COMM 4450

Don't waste your time on this class. Ask upperclassmen and you will know how bad this class is. Even if you are on the CPA track, you can still avoid it by taking Tax else where. This is the best piece of advice I can give you.

Great class for anyone to take. Given this is tax I was DREADING this class but it is actually interesting. Professor Porter makes the class fun and fairly easy. It is not hard to do well and the materials are super accessable, even for people that know nothing about tax. This is one of the most enjoyable classes I have taken in COMM.

Do not take this class unless you absolutely have to. Professor Porter is a nice woman, and I appreciated that she was very unbiased when it came to the political aspects of taxation, but she is among the worst professors I have had at UVA. She is horrible at explaining her example problems in a logical fashion during lecture and expects you to understand her work after whipping through her explanations, which usually had mistakes. As someone who relies on lectures heavily for learning, I felt as if I barely learned anything as a result. Moreover, the material is boring and often seemed very disjointed. Each chapter felt like its own unit that was completely unrelated to anything else we covered. Not to mention, her exams are extremely difficult and studying does not seem to help. I basically got the same score on all three exams even though I spent dozens of hours preparing for the final. Also, if you do take this class, do not let the weekly quizzes fool you. It's easy to do well on them, but this gives you a false sense of security because they do not prepare you for the exams at all since the exam questions are very different.

This was one of the hardest classes I've taken at UVA. Porter is a nice person and wants you to do well but is not an effective teacher. Her notes outlines are extremely disorganized and she jumps around from section to section making it very hard to follow. She frequently makes mistakes when solving in class problems which makes difficult content even more confusing. The only way to actually learn is to grill the homework questions over and over and there are a ton so it takes an impossible amount of time. Her tests were fair and she is a very generous grader who also gives a big curve at the end of the semester. I felt like this class could've been taught in a way that would make a lot more logical sense. If you are able to put in a ton of time, then it's not too hard to get decent grades but that's not always feasible and this class resulted in a lot of stress for myself and others. You do learn a lot about taxes and current events which I found helpful so it's a worthwhile class if you can tolerate independent learning.