ANTH 2400

I took this class to fulfill my NWP requirement through the college and could not have been more satisfied with my experience. The class was broken down via the following: 20% exam 1, 20% exam 2, 20% final,12% quizzes (3 each), 28% discussion. The course was structured such that you were required do do some reading before each lecture (about 30 pages on average) and then Professor Sicoli would spend the lecture mostly reiterating the important parts of the readings. Lectures and readings were both really easy to follow. Also, both the quizzes and exams were extremely straight forward if you had done the readings ahead of time and paid attention during lecture. (I would not be suprised if the exam averages were 90% or higher, though he did not release them). Overall, discussion imo was quite boring and I did not really like my TA; I hardly participated in discussion and still ended up earning 27/28 discussion points so it was certainly graded leniently. If you are looking for a pretty easy class to satisfy your NWP requirement, you really could not find a better course.

#tCFspring2021

The class was very easy, but if you're not into linguistics it will be very dry and the discussions are gonna be super ambiguous and potentially confusing; but participation is all that matters. Sicoli is a really cool guy that cares about his students and is super passionate about the course; he doesn't make things any harder than they need to be. I am a pretty mediocre student at UVA and found it pretty damn easy to get an A. He even offers tons of low hanging fruit extra credit that count as points onto your FINAL GRADE. Go to every single lecture and take notes, definitely do the assigned readings. It's not a lot of work, but the material on the quizzes and tests is almost verbatim from the lecture PowerPoints and chapters.

Your grade is determined by points, and all assignments accumulate to a grand total of roughly 100 points as follows: 28 for participation (23 for participation in discussion and 5 for lecture attendance), 12 from quizzes, 20 points each per midterm (there are 3 in total, none of them are cumulative, including the final one).

He gave us 2-4 points worth of extra credit opportunities.

If you have to choose between multiple discussion TA's, definitely go with Saad. I heard the other guy assigned extra work and stuff throughout the semester. Not cool man

#tCFspring2021 . Honestly - this course was super refreshing. I had Dr. Sicoli during the Spring 2021 semester (virtual/covid), and it was honestly super great. I've heard of teachers preaching about caring for their students or trying to be equitable but haven't ever seen it put into practice in the way that Dr. Sicoli has done for the students in his class this semester. I'm sure the class format may not be relatable if you're back in person, but we had weekly asynchronous lectures and readings. We didn't really have any homework for this class, besides just getting those done, attending our discussion section, and also writing a discussion post for section. I would say the workload for this class is very easy and manageable and not difficult by any means. I would also say that as a POC/WOC and a bilingual speaker, a lot of this stuff came naturally to me and probably will be for you if you are too. I would say that the readings are definitely necessary, as the exams or quizzes ask about specific details from it that sometimes weren't mentioned in lectures, but you don't need to read them so deeply that you're annotating every line - just try to get the main idea of what the author is trying to convey. I feel like if you just try and pay attention, this class should definitely be easy for you! Back to him being equitable now - throughout the semester, if Dr. Sicoli saw his students struggling to keep up or overwhelmed, he made adjustments to the course to help us during this weird time, and I think all of his students really appreciated that. Honestly, a great and fair course for sure.

I took this class to fulfill a humanities requirement, so take everything I say with a grain of salt given that if I had the option not to take this class, I probably would not have. This class is pretty straightforward. You read from one textbook for half the class, then an actual book by Jane Hill for the second half of the class. The first book is about linguistic terms while the second is about racism. There are three quizzes throughout the semester totaling 12% of your grade. The third one was dropped this semester, but that was probably mostly due to COVID and I wouldn't count on it for a normal semester. The quizzes were on Collab and you had ~10 minutes to answer 2-5 questions, making each question worth up to a percent of your entire grade, but they weren't questions that were out to get you. There were also three exams worth 20% of your grade each. They consisted of multiple choice questions and free response questions each worth about 50% of the test grade total. There were usually ~20 multiple choice questions and 5 free response. I'm writing this before test 3, but Sicoli said in lecture that we'd be having a lot more free response questions for test 3 since he was making it open notes and without a time limit, which seems fair. The last 28% of your grade is "participation" which was in the syllabus as "class participation through lecture attendance (viewing times are logged in Lecture Capture) and through attendance and participation in your mandatory discussion section as well as any other discussion requirements of TAs". 28% is a large portion of your grade, and I don't have my grade yet, but I assume that if you watch the lectures which you should anyway (or attend post COVID), do the discussion posts on Collab (or real discussion in the future maybe), and talk in discussion, that's probably all you need depending on the TA. Overall, I wouldn't call the class super difficult, but it would have been more enjoyable had I liked linguistics. If you like that type of thing, this might be an interesting class!

I loved this class! Sicoli's work is super cool although his lecturing is a bit dry - I stopped paying attention in lecture after the first exam, and you could probably stop sooner if you want/check that he is planning on making study guides before exams. He pulls exam questions from the study guide exclusively so you can find all the necessary information in the textbook and study from that. Discussion was also super cool, I loved my TA (shoutout to Kennedy Castillo). I went to him for help with the final essay and he made me feel awesome about my writing coming from non-humanities background (Cognitive Science major, premed). Highly recommend this class!

Easy course, and Sicoli is interesting enough. Most of the class is how we reproduce racism, but focusing on indigenous communities in south and Central America. Two in person exams

This is the kind of class where you get out of it what you put in. It's not that hard to skim the readings and bullshit your way through this class to an easy A, however the concepts are extremely useful. In this semester alone, I've recycled and applied concepts from this class in other classes and just in conversation in really interesting ways. If you're interested in politics, philosophy, psychology, theories of race and gender, and any and all interdisciplinary programs (PST, PPL, GDS, etc) I HIGHLY recommend this class. The class starts out a bit dry, and Sicoli's lecturing style is a bit dry too. But if you stick with it, have a good TA, and talk to Professor Sicoli outside of class, you will get a lot out of this class!

If you're not an Anthropology major like me, I recommend this class if you are looking for a relatively easy and interesting course to fulfill one of your general requirements (I used it for non-Western perspective). Most of the material is extremely intuitive so even if you skimped out on doing the readings for that week you should be able to respond to discussion or exam questions with relative ease. First half of the class is more technical about linguistics and the second half focuses a lot on racism, both halves were easy with the latter being more so.