SYS 3023

The course feels really arbitrary. The professor’s lectures expect you to treat every design principle like a religion and somehow read his mind for what he wants on the assignments. The instructions for these assignments are often vague and riddled with spelling mistakes or design issues, and if you interpret them differently than the professor intended, you're pretty much set up to fail. The grading system doesn’t help either — one mistake can derail your entire grade and its often just opinion-based grading. Some of the TAs aren’t very helpful, which just makes the whole situation worse.

This class is fine. Sometimes its really interesting and other times you are falling asleep. It was also at 9:30AM and attendance is required so that probably played a factor. This is not a hard class if you just stay on top of your work and turn everything in on time. As long as your projects are up to an acceptable level (which is not very hard to achieve) you will pass all of them and get an A in the course. Gerling is a nice guy who does know what he's talking about but the lectures are just hard to get excited about. The TA's were great this semester. #tCFF23

This class is completely different than any other systems class required before. It is split equally between two - different professors with incredibly different teaching styles. The course consists of 1 exam (which is essentially a large homework set), 6 individual assignments and 3 group assignments. The exam average was a 95% and if you put forth decent effort you were almost guaranteed an A. The individual assignments were also graded fairly nicely and were easy to understand if you paid attention in class. I was cruising with a solid A in the course until the very end. The 3 group assignments are all part of 1 big project and you have the same groupmates for every task. Reason I bring this up is that if you get a not-great group it becomes a lot of work very fast dead smack in the middle of finals season. The professors grade the group assignments much more harshly and it is not nearly as easy as the rest of the course. Best advice for a group project is to get started early and stay in good communication. Otherwise one poor person ends up doing 20+ hours of work and that is just brutal, especially since part 2 is due the first weekend of finals and part 3 is due the 2nd week of finals.

Yeah this class sucks. Grading is entirely arbitrary, lectures/readings frequently don't cover material on assessments, and the weekly workload is either negligible or insanely difficult (like 20 hours in a week). Thank god for COVID CR/NC

This is a required course for Systems, so in that case, I would say that Gerling is probably a better bet than the other professors that teach the class.

Pros: This is a very useful course especially if you're interested in UX/UI design work post grad and its good to have Gerling on your side if you are thinking about doing a Human Factors application sequence. There is a lot of group work which I think is a benefit and there's no final exam so it takes some pressure off.

Cons: My main complaints center around how this class was graded. The grading is totally subjective so going to office hours is essentially useless. For example, I would see Gerling in office hours to get feedback on my interface, then still get a mediocre grade and when I brought it up to him (saying that he said he liked it in office hours) he said he trusted the opinion of the TA that graded it. That was very frustrating because he will preach the right and wrong way to design something but then he totally subjective in his grading. The exams are long and hard to study for because his lectures are pretty basic, and he put a 10 point multiple choice question on one of them.

Advice: DO NOT use red and green to symbolize good and bad because Gerling is colorblind and he will make it ALL about himself if you do.

This course is probably the worst class I have ever taken. The topics are so easy that one could literally spend a day and basically learn all these things by themselves. But, since this is the UVA School of Engineering and the professor is Greg Gerling, it will simply not be easy. Your grade in this class basically comes down to 4 group projects and 2 exams which comprise 85% of your grade (the other 15% are weekly submissions which are a completion grade so everyone gets 100). For the first 3 projects, he randomly assigns your group and for the last one you can pick. My group was actual trash for the first 3 and when I mentioned this to him he didn't do anything about it and laughed at me. Similarly, the exams in this class are very arbitrary and it is not uncommon to have a 10 point question on something he said once in lecture. He is the meanest, most arrogant person I know and does not want to help you do well. Every group assignment takes almost 25 hours to complete, with a lot of feedback in between. Yet, you always somehow end up doing bad on them because of his stupid grading. Worst class ever, I absolutely hated it. UI Design is a very interesting topic, but Gerling will make you hate it so quickly. If you want to go into UI design and are not a systems engineer, learn this by watching YouTube or take another class. For the love of God, UVA needs to do something about him. That's that.

For a class that appeared very promising, it managed to be quite confusing and poorly led. The information was not presented in any sort of intuitive manner and there were some topics they covered over and over and over and it was still confusing. 4 minutes of googling and it was like "Oh.. That's it? That's all they needed to say?"
The project could have been so much more interesting if they had given a little more insight into what was actually expected. Projects were graded extremely harshly for how open ended they were. Same with the exams. Questions would be phrased in a very vague, open-ended manner, but then you'd lose all the points because you didn't mention 1 very specific design element.

This class seems exciting because you get to apply the content and actually make designs, but Professors Gerling and Kim did not execute very well. First, I found it hard to pay attention in lecture because so much of the material seems intuitive. The individual assignments were easy points but very ineffective to get you to learn the material. The 3 group assignments conversely demanded about 15-20 hours of work and were graded questionably. For one of these projects (which are 10% of your final grade each) he gave out scores as low as 4/10 when 7/10 is clearly defined in the syllabus as: "clear signs of lack of effort and understanding." Tests are typically about what you would expect but they knit pick when grading to get some variation in scores.

This class is literally common knowledge, but the professors make it incredibly difficult so that they can keep their job and create a grade distribution. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS IF YOU ARE NOT A SYSTEMS MAJOR BECAUSE YOU COULD LEARN IT ONLINE IN 5 minutes. Group projects are graded randomly and it is hard to succeed.

This class finds the rare balance between being interesting and so trivial that it is relentlessly pointless. The class is co run by two professors. Naturally only one of them has any real say in how the course is constructed. It is basically impossible to ensure that you get good grades on the group assignments (basically everyone is clustered at the same place because every design has tradeoffs [no shit], therefore can't be perfect). Basically what this means is that you need to do well on the tests. The tests are easy but you should actually prepare well for them because 1) random info the professor only mentions once could be on it and 2) they have the only controllable impact on your grade.

For a class focused on the importance of clearly conveying information, this was a pretty unnecessarily confusing class. Contradictory information in some of the messiest lecture slides I've ever seen combined with arbitrarily/inconsistently graded projects and exams leads to a pretty sad class experience. Disappointing, as most systems majors are at least somewhat interested in this field and there are some promising moments and assignments. Know the definitions that the professor(s) want you to know, but might not say in lecture, and especially not the ones you might find online after you turn there upon encountering a term mentioned just once in a set of slides that aren't ever presented in class. Get started early on group assignments.

Human factors is a very interesting topic but this class is super boring. You can bring in a cheat sheet to the midterms and finals. Hint: the test material is all from the powerpoints, dont bother combing through the textbook. The grading can seem very arbitrary, especially for group assignments.

This class has been changed (as of fall 2014), and based off of past reviews probably for the better. Instead of having one large project over the course of the semester, there were 6 individual assignments and 4 group assignments. The material is interesting and not particularly challenging (very little math compared with most engineering courses). That said, a lot of work is required, and Professor Gerling has fairly high standards for the quality of the work. For Systems Engineers, this should be an improvement. Not sure if I'd recommend it to anyone else considering the time required to do well.

What a waste of a required class for Systems majors. The material in this class was disorganized, difficult to follow, and even more difficult to apply. I expected to learn principles of good design and to have a chance to generate innovative ideas, but instead was forced to memorize psychological principles with very limited scope and do an unsatisfying group project with an absurd amount of documentation. This class was nothing like I expected, and I was sorely disappointed.

A necessary class for Systems majors. A fairly difficult course but a course that you get a lot out of.

For a class claiming to be about usability and ergonomics, 3023 was, ironically, the least user-friendly class I've taken. Huge group project dominates the class, and can be an overwhelming task if you don't get a cooperative group. Lectures are crushingly boring, especially when Donahue is up there. Nevertheless, the subject is interesting and fresh, and I learned a new coding language in the process, so not a total loss.

Donohue was the co-professor with Gerling this year. She was impossible to pay attention to and didn't capture the class by any means. That said, this class was interesting and lead to creative development.

It is just a lot of group work on top of other classes taken alongside it

I really enjoyed this class. The professors are fair and really know what they are talking about.

This class was not the most enjoyable class. It's basically a design class, but design is pretty common sense if you think about it. The readings they give you try to provide the "science" behind the common sense. Did not get to choose group members for semester project, used CATME to pair groups. If you don't get a good group you are basically SOL. You get to review teammates at the end of the semester which can affect their grade, so help out your group.

Not the most enjoyable class. There's a lot of mindless reading with a few quizzes. There's one test towards the end of the semester; the professors say it will be based on both the lecture slides and the readings. Fortunately, the questions are pretty much solely on the lectures; do not waste your time with the readings, just focus on what's on Collab. The majority of your time for this class will be spent on a project you and your groupmates get to choose. It's rewarding in the end, although there are a large number of documents due for it. Keep tabs of when stuff is due, otherwise they will take a really long time. Lastly, make sure that you really try to get a lot done on your project during the beginning and middle of the semester; there's a lot more due at the end.

Every year there is a quiz after the first reading of the semester. There are readings for every class but very few pop quizzes (between 1 and 3 each semester), so if you do well on the first one, you'll likely be set.

The midterm isn't too bad, and they let you bring in a note card with terms you don't remember.

The group project is a pain. Sorta similar to the 201 project. Hope that you get a good group.

There is a reading assignment for each class, and there are 2 or 3 random reading quizes, so watch out for those. There is one final exam that is taken the week before Thanksgiving that is on the reading, so if you haven't done the reading all semester (which you can get away with for the most part) then you will have some catching up to do. Big projects that are fairly arbitrary are what the class is focused on.

This class is pretty hard, especially the tests. Memorize all the diagrams they give you. All of them. Seriously. Pick a good group for the semester project, because you will want to die if you don't.

I hated this class. Guerlain just pissed everybody off and Gerling spent most of his time fixing Guerlain's mistakes and outbursts.

The TA was horrible. Also, the class was pretty sucky too. Grading is arbitrary and the workload is high.

The class isn't hard but the group work is extremely time consuming. The professors are very particular about how the project was done. The classwork and tests were not difficult.

This class was very tedious. The work (homeworks and test) was not particularly difficult and didn't take too much time. The group work, on the other hand, took very long if you wanted to do well. It is a good idea to stay on top of your group and make sure things get done early.

The material is important to learn, though, so it is a very worthwhile class overall.

Homeworks can take a long time to do and are ojectively graded harshly. The TA was a jerk and not helpful. The semester project requires coding knowledge so get someone in your group who knows how to code because the class doesnt teach you any coding. Do the best you can on the project so your group doesnt screw you over in the final group evaluation.

very interesting and enjoyable class

Class was pretty easy, just don't get yourself screwed over with your group, because they might not rate you as a good group member. Work entire semester on a project that you present at the end of the class.

Prof Gerling is new to UVA, great professor, really cares

Though the class was fairly easy, centering around a group project that made the majority of the grade, the professors did not grade accordingly. I did the majority of the work for my group's project and expressed this to the professors who assured me that my grade would reflect the time and effort put into the project. However, this was not the case. To put it bluntly, I got shafted.

Didn't learn much. Only have a couple of homeworks throughout the semester. Never went to lecture. Lectures were useless. There is only a final presentation, no tests.

This class mostly focused on a major project, with homework assignments here and there. I found it to be very interesting and pretty easy. So long as you get a good, motivated group and pick a halfway decent project, this class is no problem.

Class has good potential. Not as organized as it could have been and too much of the grade was determined by how well you could write/understand vague directions. Though the professors were more or less new at teaching the class and seem willing to change to make it better in the future. No tests. Just HW every once in a while and a semester long project.