STAT 5120

This class was pretty easy. I took it as a second-year, and it was probably the easiest class I took this semester.

There were 7 homework assignments that involved running some R code he gave us and interpreting the results, or doing some mild calculations/algebra. The lecture slides provided everything you needed to do well on the assignments and exams, which were open-note. The longest I spent on one was maybe 4 hours, but that was an exception, as the rest took maybe 1-2 hours each.

Professor Tang was an awesome guy, and highly recommend him. The second exam was very difficult for the entire class, and I was admittedly afraid of doing poorly in the class. However, he noticed that he made the exam too difficult, and gave us all a very generous curve. He cares about his students, and wants to see us succeed.

More about the exams: as I said, they follow the lecture slides pretty well. There were 3 of them, with the first 2 being 20% of our semester grade each, the last being 35%. A LOT of it was interpreting regression/anova tables in R, so I highly recommend having R experience before this class. Don't be scared by the MATH 3351 prereq either (I know I was, I barely passed that class). He gives like one or two matrix problems for the homework, and no matrices showed up on the exams.

Overall, I highly recommend this class to anyone who wants their transcript to look nice with a 5000-level class.

#tCFspring2021

I took this as a 2nd year and it was one of the easiest classes I've taken at UVA. If you're an undergrad statistics major, strongly consider taking this over STAT 3220 - my roommate took STAT 3220 this semester and it looked like quite a bit of work, whereas this class required two homework problems every week or two. The homeworks involved running some provided R code and interpreting the results, and every once in a while you might have to do some algebra. The longest I spent on a homework was maybe 2 hours. The exams were straight forward and graded very leniently. After the first exam, most of the class stopped showing up to lecture (because the first exam was so easy). Attendance wasn't mandatory and honestly probably not necessary at all to succeed in the class, but I enjoyed Professor Tang's lectures. He's very knowledgeable on the topic and definitely wants his students to succeed.