STAT 2120

Imma be honest, I haven't shown up to lecture since the first class. I just go look at the lecture slides and make my own notes and so far I've gotten 23/25 and 22/25 on each respective mini exam. The class is not hard, I spend like zero time on it. I'm giving her a 5 star as an instructor (I don't even remember what she looks like at this point). There's barely any math, except for a few equations, but you can just write them on your study sheet for when you take the exam. The exams are not cumulative which is super nice and the labs I just do on my own at home and ask Chatgpt for when I'm confused on a subject. The lecture slides are actually super good and if you actually just read through them and take notes then you are golden.
TLDR Easy class, I take my own notes and don't go to lecture and have an A/95 (before final)

Dr. Martinet is the most organized professor I have had. She is very patient with students and receptive in office hours. Unfortunately this class was incredibly boring .

Although this class was recently restructured to include a heavier coding component, Prof. Martinet makes sure to not place too much of an emphasis on the code so as to not overwhelm those who have never taken a cs class before. Instead, she spends the majority of class time giving an overview of basic statistical concepts, which are then reinforced with the labs and homework. The work load is definitely doable, especially for being 4 credits. Prof. Martinet is very intelligent, but also very sweet and cares about her students. Clickers, post lecture quizzes, labs, and both midterms are 10% each, and homework is 15%, as is the group project with peer review, and the final is 20%. Exams are very fair, and she drops the lowest few quizzes, labs, and homeworks. If you are on the fence about taking this class, you definitely should!

Gretchen is the hands down the BEST PROFESSOR. She is very organized and clear about expectations from the beginning of the semester. There is nothing in the homework that can't be solved using the slides, and labs can be easily completed during the 50 minutes (usually less though). I never bought the textbook and I don't need it because everything is explained well in class. Take this class and take it with Gretchen!!!

The class explains very little and leaves you to figure out everything by yourself. The only thing that is clear are the deadlines

Martinet makes this class very difficult and is not a good lecturer. Be prepared to learn everything on your own. Her lectures are powerpoints pulled straight from the book. The homework is difficult and doesn't refer to the book. good luck.

Ugh this was the worst class I have taken at UVA. Martinet did not teach or offer any useful help. The online work did not relate to the textbook or lecture materials. Yahoo answers was 18577465638294 times more helpful than Martinet. Take it with someone else if you can.

I would not recommend this class if you do not have to take it (precomm). Although Gretchen seems like a pretty good person, she structures the class in a frustrating way. There are weekly homework assignments that take a while, once a week individual lab assignments, once a week group labs, and a semester-long group statistical study. There are two midterms and a final exam, all of which have average grades in the high 60's/low 70's because the questions are completely different from any of the homeworks and labs. She doesn't curve because she says it isn't necessary considering how well everyone usually does on the other factors in your final grade. Although I did end up with a pretty ok grade and what she said held true, it was a very stressful semester of studying very hard, not doing well on exams, and having no idea how my final grade would turn out.

When it comes to recommending this class, the fact is you probably have to take it as a pre-req or you aren't thinking about taking it. I found the material not extremely hard but there is definitely some tricky stuff. There is a problem set each week, participation via an online system, two midterms, and a final. Then for the lab there are two assignments a week, one group and one individual but you are still with your group, then there is a statistical study where you do your own study (survey). I had Chenyi Pan as my TA for lab and she seemed to help much more with the labs by showing answer sheets and grading kindly. As for Prof. Martinet, the notes were helpful and I think she's a good professor. There is just a lot to get through and some of it can be annoying and difficult. As I said, you probably have to take this class, if you study a good amount it shouldn't be too awful but many people do struggle. If you don't have to take this class, you do learn many interesting things and it may still be good to take.

This class was my least favorite by far. Having never taken statistics before, the material was confusing from the start and Martinet had a "this should be pretty obvious" attitude which didn't help. I had to learn literally everything by myself. Lab was a pain and my TA graded far harder than the others did, which hurt since Martinet assumed lab would boost our grade (my group got a C+ on the stat study). Test averages were usually around 70%. At the end of the course I ended up with an A- due to a pretty decent curve (who knows how she applied it though, since she never said anything about it).

Statistics SHOULD be a relatively straightforward class. After all, you're just dealing with numbers and averages- numbers don't lie, right? WRONG. This class is the mother of all of those tricky, bitchy classes that you have to carefully navigate through during the semester if you want to even have hope of finishing with a good grade. It certainly is the Comm School weedout for host of reasons. First of all, Gretchen was a pretty bad lecturer, mostly reading off of PowerPoints 90% of the time- someone who went to class wouldn't have much of a better clue of what the hell was going on than someone who didn't. The labs are set up pretty horribly and extremely confusing- not to mention I had a TA who couldn't even speak English right (Bo Yang). The homeworks are hard to do because you don't really have any idea of what's going on in the first place, so you have to BS your way through most of it. Finally, the tests are literally designed to trick you- it seems as if every other question is a trick question. Don't take this course unless you need to. You have been warned.

Martinet gets a bad rap mainly because the class is difficult (which is because it is a weed out for the COMM school), but she really isn't that bad. The test are going to be ridiculously hard with whatever teacher even if you understand the material. Overall I would not take this class if you don't have to for COMM school because it is not fun and pretty hard.

I actually really liked Professor Martinet. She was laid back, helpful, and willing to work with her students with whatever issues arose. Her lectures weren't the easiest way to learn statistics, but I think that she did as good of a job as anyone could have in a stat lecture. You don't need to read the textbook - just go over her powerpoints - and do all the assignments and you're good. Her grading is pretty lenient as well, which makes up for the difficulty of the exams.

So, Professor Martinet is very nice who clearly means the best for her students, and effectively gives us a lot of work in an attempt to make us understand the material in addition to padding our grade. In essence, she wants us to earn our curve, and that is something that I don't want to particularly complain about. Both the homework and the labs help to understand the material, yet, for some indescribable reason, something strange happens on the tests. One could be getting hundreds in the labs and homework, yet have inordinate difficulty on the test. It's just something that has to "click" with people and the problem just falls into place. She teaches all the material, but, for some reason, the test never seem to reflect what I imagine is a fair number's ability in being able to actually do the material. Could be worse, but could also be a lot better

Prof. Martinet is a nice lady, but OMG she is a very bad professor!
She just reads her slides and stands there for an hour, then after showing easy examples she asks if anyone has questions. Later on her labs have no meaning other than just to sit there and fill out easy information and get credit for it.
However, when tests come around shit gets hard really fast real quick. The questions make you wonder if its introduction in statistics or not. Furthermore, the average for the tests are in the D range and no curve because apparently easy homework and labs are supposed to work as a curve.
I honestly think that she means no ill, but her logic of teaching has many flaws. She expects you to catch on all of material on your own. Overall, avoid this class at all costs unless you really have to take it, and even if you do take it with some one else.

Listen to me carefully. Martinet is a very nice lady who tries, but unfortunately for her, she fails, miserably. She literally stands there and reads the slides (which are available on collab) making coming to class almost pointless. However, she does Learning Catalytics so you may want to come to class... Or, you can stay home and do it seeing that the answers are relatively easy usually. The textbook saved me, cause I actually read it, which was the only way I passed.. With a C+. The labs were not very difficult in my opinion, however they did take me about 1-5 hours sometimes. The homework is relatively easy, but not so much so, but you get like 30 attempts per question. Now here is my problem with the class. It's a severe case of "In class: 1+1=2... On exam: Johnny has four apples and gives away 1, calculate the mass of the sun". NOTHING you do in class is even slightly reflective of the exams. The questions are very tricky, and the exam is takes some time to do. Also she thinks she doing us a favor by giving us a formula sheet, however we use excel for basically everything besides exams, and she doesn't teach us calculator functions, so you have to use the ones on the formula sheet... And that's IF you know which formula is for what. There is also a lot of useless information to throw you off as well. I do not recommend this class. The average for the final was a 67. The lowest grade was a 25. Highest 100 (people who probably took over the class). Please stay away.

Before I start railing this class overall, I want to say that I think Professor Martinet is a very nice lady, who does try to seem accessible to students and has been very courteous when I emailed her with questions about the class.

That said, this class is truly dreadful. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for a few different reasons. Honestly, the main sticking point for me was the fact that the exams were absolutely nothing like any of the work that she gives you throughout the semester. And trust me, I did plenty of work throughout the semester as it was.

The homework was annoying, but is helpful because it does basically require you to learn the material. I liked this, sort of. The cool part of the homework is that she gives you thirty attempts for usually 15-17 of the 20 problems assigned! And, typically, if you still can't get it, she'll give you more attempts. This is really helpful too as most of these problems have multiple parts to them and it will show you which part is right and will give you partial credit! The problem lies in those other 3-5 problems. The things that were cool about the other problems don't exist with these. You get four attempts, which is admittedly fair for the usual multiple choice/TF questions that they are. But there is no partial credit, and it won't tell you if you got them right or not. Not to mention that on many occasions I spotted some questions that blatantly contradicted the notes. That's annoying as sin. Luckily, Martinet drops 2 of the 12 homework grades, so it is a little forgiving.

Next are the labs. My Statistical Study group was quite fantastic, I must say. I really enjoyed my other two partners as they were very competent and really helped me understand the material sometimes (my lecture was a day behind theirs). Really cool people. We ended up getting great grades for the work that we did together, and I felt that this was a really satisfying part of the course. However, my TA was not. Heather Cook was a mixed bag. I do think she cared but I think everyone got a really bad feeling about her at the beginning. It was mostly little stuff, but I felt uncomfortable with my grades with her. There were several occasions where the grades on my papers didn't match what was on Collab, and that's a really scary thought at the end of the semester when you're not getting the paper submissions back anymore.

The individual labs were very difficult, I thought. They typically took me about 4-7 hours to do overall, and I think that's a bit overkill.

Learning Catalytics was fine. Also, it appears that a lot of people did start skipping because Martinet changed the grading scale for that part of the final grade. The Learning Catalytics part was fair, albeit a tad bit useless.

Also, as I said before, the exams were ungodly hard at times. The final was especially hard. Honestly, even after I did every homework set and did every lab, I didn't have a clue what I was doing on the final even though I should have already done everything throughout the course and gotten really good grades. I think this stems from the fact that Martinet specifically chooses to teach you to use Excel, and then takes it away on the tests. She gives you the functions in the back, but then gives you a bunch of distractor functions as well. That's not fair in the slightest. If it says anything, the average for the final exam was a 67.

I think I've said enough. Overall, if a friend asked me if I recommended this course, I would definitely say no. This class was awful.

This was easily the worst class I have ever taken. The material was somewhat interesting, but Martinet made it difficult to understand. For the most part, she just read off of her slides in her powerpoints, but when she would finally decide to provide her own explanations, her explanations were so convoluted that I wish she had just continued to read off of her slides. She told us to not worry about reading the textbook or doing practice problems from it because the book is useless (which would have been nice of her to tell us BEFORE we actually bought the book). The Learning Catalytics questions (these are just online interactive questions asked during the lectures) are pointless, but if you show up to every class and answer them, you're pretty much guaranteed a 100 percent for them. The only homework you get are weekly problem sets. These are really hard sometimes and the only way you can get help with them is if you post questions about the problem sets on the collab discussion boards or go to the TA help labs. Posting on the discussion board is useless because the TAs and Martinet don't have time to get back to you typically until after the problem sets are due. Your best bet is going to the help labs, but even these are pointless sometimes. I found one TA that was really good who could help me every Thursday night, but the rest of them were useless. I would recommend trying to get 100 percents on all of your homeworks because the exams are hard and you need all the points you can get. As for the exams, she posts practices exams about a week and half before the actual exams. The problem with this is that she does not provide worked-out solutions to the problems, so if you don't understand something, you can post on the discussion board (which is unreliable because your questions will not be answered in a timely manner), go to a help lab, or wait until the last lecture before the exam to ask questions. The last lecture before every exam is a Q&A style lecture, but there are a lot of questions and more often than not, I was not called on when I raised my hand in those lectures to ask questions. I tried going to her office hours twice about exam questions. The first time, it was so busy that she didn't have time to get to everyone. The second time, she seemed genuinely irritated that I was there. As for labs, they were just busy work. You'll have individual labs one day of the week and group project time the other day of the week during your scheduled lab times. As for the individual labs, try to get as high of a percentage as you can on them because these will boost your final grade. As for the group project, you will be conducting your own statistical study. This part isn't too time consuming or difficult if you're assigned to a good group. The final paper you turn in to your lab TA is a maximum of 10 pages, including graphs that you insert into your text, so the paper isn't actually all that long. The TAs in my lab were useless. The GTA who ran the class didn't speak English well at all, so it made it difficult to ask questions about individual labs or the statistical study. The lab was very unorganized and it felt like I was doing busy work most of the time. Overall, the class was much harder and much more boring than I thought it would be. The class average for the first exam was about an 83. The class average for the second exam was a 70. Martinet doesn't curve exams until the very end of the course when she sees everyone's final grades. I would not recommend taking this class with Martinet because she was boring and extremely unhelpful. And I would not recommend taking this course at all unless you want to apply to the commerce school or you have a genuine interest in statistics.

This will, hopefully, be the worst course I will ever take at UVa because I can't imagine anything being more awful than this. Avoid unless you need it for a major.

People are too critical of this class and especially Professor Martinet. The course is difficult, but Professor Martinet is very kind and really does try to help students. She is very generous with her time and very responsive to student feedback. Her lectures certainly aren't the most exciting, but she does make an effort to incorporate real life examples and responds to all student questions. Overall, still a challenging class, but if you have to take it, I would recommend Martinet.

This course is awful for a variety of reasons you should now going into it. The first is the nature of the class. It is incredibly boring as Martinet just reads off of the power point the whole time and never expands on anything and lectures in the same voice every time. The second is the structure of grading. Participation comes from answering questions online through a program called, "Learning Catalytics". This system means that the flow of the lecture is constantly interrupted which makes it even harder to focus on paying attention to the abysmally boring material. Exams compose the vast majority of your grade which is a big problem because of the way the exams are. They are 20 question multiple choice tests. This doesn't sound too bad, but because statistics is all about mathematical processes each question takes a long time to complete using very specific methods. Usually the determination of which method to use comes from the wording which is at best meant to trip you up and at worst inaccurate. For example a question might slip in the word "approximate" but then leave the exact probability as one of the answer choices, so if you pick the most correct answer you are still wrong. Make small mistakes here and there and you can very easily end up looking at a C (no curve). Despite the issues in the lecture the lab section is the worst part about this course. Lab is an absolute waste of many hours per week when you are forced to plug countless numbers into spreadsheets for a grade. One big factor is your TA. My TA (Heather Cook) was apathetic and rude. She lazed about in a chair while we all worked and when we asked her a question on the lab or the material the most likely response was, "I don't know" or "Figure it out yourself". She also passed on the grading of our work to someone else, so she was literally no help when you had questions about your previous labs. It is most unfortunate that hundreds of students every year are forced to take this class for comm or econ as it really is dreadful. Do your best to avoid this class!

This professor is the most retarded person I have seen in my life. Maybe so because she's pregnant. She does not have any knowledge in statistics. Her webworks are time consuming and boring. My TA was Heather Cook and she hated her job too.

Not a terrible teacher and I really liked her until she did not send out any information regarding how she graded the course in the end. For the first 2 midterms she sent out a distribution of the grades but for the final she did not send that out or did she bother to inform us if she curved the class or not.

Ehh. Statistics is hard, but useful. UVA has had trouble teaching this class, and I do not know what else I could have expected from Martinet. Her teaching consisted mostly of reading off PowerPoint slides and going through examples on a projector and on Excel. Grading was fair, if the exams were not. MC exams mean no partial credit, and it was hard to get a good grade on either midterm even if neither felt that hard. The final exam was unnecessarily difficult, though it did not seem to have adversely affected my average. Plus, low exam averages are balanced out by near perfect scores on HWs and labs. One problem I have with this class is that lectures, labs, and HW relies on Excel for completion, while only calculators are allowed on exams. This inconsistency resulted in having to take time before exams to figure out how to do everything on the calculator. Ultimately, this class is neither fun nor easy, but definitely worth taking. Average marks for Martinet.

Overall, I thought the class was pretty standard. If you put in the work, you'll see the results. Martinet makes herself accessible but you must take the initiative to visit her during office hours. During lectures she pretty much just read from the slides. They weren't terribly helpful but it's possible to get an A without reading the book.

Absolutely horrible class. The different components of the class do not correlate together. It's 100% possible to get 100% on the labs and homework (I did) and end up failing on the exams. The reason why is the test questions aren't anything like the examples during lecture, problems in homework and lab. The tests consist of twenty two or so MC questions that are all word problems. She never teaches you how to approach a problem or how to go about solving one of those trickily worded problems that are obviously designed to trip you up. And what's worse is she doesn't curve. Which make no sense in my opinion because everyone i know almost failed both midterms. Overall, poor lecturer, convoluted structure/design for the class, ridiculously difficult tests. Paul Diver does a review at the end of the semester and he's the BEST. Don't take unless it's a prereq or if you've taken AP Stat in high school. Although, I know a guy who got a 4 on the AP exam and took 2120 just for fun, and now he has a D.

Really don't think the content in this class is that tough, but it's just taught so poorly. Not completely her fault because its tough to teach math on lecture slides. She just reads the slides and does some excel examples, which won't help on the test because we don't have excel for tests. Tests aren't easy because they try and trip you up with small details, which make you need to read everything carefully. Also, tests are multiple choice, so no partial credit, which can be a killer if you make small mistakes, you will lose all the points. Don't take unless you really love Stat or a prereq.

Really difficult class, exams are especially hard. Teacher shows us how to do things on excel, but we can only use our calculators on the exams, they don't show you how to use calculator (have to look up online). Labs and Hw aren't too bad, but study a lot for the exams. Don't take unless you need it as a comm pre-req or are really into statistics, and if you take it as a comm pre-req I recommend taking it in the spring of your second year.

Professor Martinet is not a good lecturer. She reads off the slides and does most of her examples on Excel, which is useless since on the test we use calculators. For the two midterms we had, the mean was in the 70s. The textbook is also very difficult to understand and digest while the labs are irrelevant. It's not horribly difficult, but it's definitely not a class I would like to take again.

Very frustrating class. Martinet is a nice teacher and is pretty helpful but it is very difficult to do well in the class. The structure of the class and exams make it challenging to pull off a good grade. Somehow she does not curve the exams, even though the class average for each of the exams has been in the 70s. It feels like some of the questions on the exams are trick questions and worded strangely. I left the first exam thinking I did well and ended up getting a 71.

Martinet's really nice, but in lecture, she'll do some examples that are helpful but otherwise, pretty much just reads off of the slides. Overall, the lectures aren't very informative, but her office hours are generally helpful- just make sure you have your own specific questions to bring to the table.

Martinet seems like a really cool person, and she's definitely really smart, but she's not the best teacher I've ever had. She pretty much just reads from the slides, but she does try to do examples in excel and on paper. Labs are kind of stupid, and my TA usually would make an excel worksheet with all the formulas already in there that she'd put on collab, so it only took about 10 minutes every time. Martinet tries to make the classes interesting and does a lot of examples with things like number of beers to BAC, but its kind of a boring class. However she really tries to help out, and lets you attend lectures other than the one you're registered for and when she knew that there was a busy week for most people, she cancelled that weeks homework. All in all not the best teacher but could definitely be a lot worse.

Martinet is a really nice and reasonable professor. You can tell she really cares about your progress. Lectures are sometimes hard to follow, but she is very helpful during office hours. Tests are not that bad if you study hard. Definitely don't take this class unless you have to, but Martinet makes it manageable.

You have to teach yourself everything but it's not that hard.

Even though she's better than Spitzner, her tests are impossible. I got a tutor after the first midterm and felt extremely prepared before the second midterm and then ended up having no idea how to do half of the problems. Definitely find a group to do the homework with.

Gretchen is not a good lecturer. She speeds through her power points and explains everything using Microsoft Excel (which is obviously no help for the midterms). Be prepared to teach yourself most of the material. The labs and homework (both of which are easy to get 100%) are 30% of the final grade, which is huge because she does not curve the midterms. If this class is mandatory for your prerequisites, Gretchen would be easier than Spitzner, as long as you take the time to teach yourself the material or get a good tutor.