Dr. Whittle is a great professor; he's very accommodating and understanding. He always makes sure you truly understand the material he teaches, and he's more than willing to help you out when you go to office hours. Though, I will say, if you are not an astronomy/astrophysics major, you should steer clear. In the syllabus, we were meant to complete 14 homework topics with a midterm and a final but since everybody kept turning in the worksheets late, the midterm was skipped, and we were only able to complete up til 9 topics. The worksheets were usually about 10+ pages long, with general questions pertaining to the new topics, and included around 2-4 projects. He also covered how to complete them in the lectures, which included videos to help us. However, they still took quite a bit of time to finish. He does teach you useful skills, such as learning how to use Excel and creating graphs, but unless you are genuinely interested in pursuing a career in astronomy, I recommend skipping this class to save your GPA.
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3 Reviews
Great professor, the biweekly worksheets were just extremely long. It took me about 15 hours to do each one. However, you definitely get a lot better at excel, and learn exponentially more compared to most intro courses.
If you are not an Astro major / this isn't a requirement, please don't take this class. I took this out of interest and regret it so much. The worksheets for each topic are unbearable, very long and tedious "groupwork" that you do by yourself and make up a significant chunk of your grade, easily the worst assignments I've had at UVA. This class uses a lot of trig as well, so if you are not comfortable with that, you will struggle to follow the concepts. Prof. is a nice guy and if the worksheets did not exist this class would not be so bad, but they do and it is. Have not had a test yet, only 2 moths in, but felt strongly enough at this point to come make this post.
Tldr: Great prof, awful class assignments, avoid taking
Note: this is the first time being taught so hopefully he fixes the worksheets for next time, otherwise avoid