COMM 2010

Look, there's no sugar-coating it. This is a hard course, and as you can see throughout the comment section below, it is clearly "weed-out" course for the COMM school. Roger Martin is a fine professor, not great, but also not the WOAT/Devil as everyone is making him out to be. In this comment, I'm going to give the most unbiased and clear-cut review I can and just lay it out:

1. Prereq for COMM - Like it or not, you have to take this class if you want to do COMM. And let's be real, accounting kinda blows, but you just gotta grind through it. And to be fair, it's really not that bad.

2. Taking it online - Some kids hate this, some like it. I was kinda in the middle. The downside is that you're pretty much teaching yourself all the accounting concepts through the readings. I'd say I spent around 3 hours each week going over the readings. I didn't take any notes, which definitely subtracted some time from my overall workload. When you don't get to go over stuff in lecture, it's much harder for the material to stick, and you gotta spend more time on it. The upside of taking it online is that it adds so much leeway to your schedule and honestly you probably end up spending less time in class/doing work. This definitely helps in studying with other classes and budgeting your time throughout the semester with non-school related things.

3. HWs - the homeworks are pretty straightforward and take about 2-3 hours to do each weekend. They are fair, reasonable, and do a decent job of testing you on the concepts learned in the readings.

4. Exams - the Exams are tough, as they should be. My biggest tip for studying for the exams is to pay attention to the underlying accounting concepts when reading over chapters and reviewing previous HWs. I think kids often get stuck in the trap where they just memorize how to do the problems on the HWs and think that that's enough to get them a good grade in the class. DON'T DO THAT! The Exam questions are harder than the HW questions in the sense that they will push your understanding of the accounting concepts slightly further. Kids who just memorize stuff get screwed and then they go and complain to Roger about how he's not a good teacher and this class sucks -- this is ridiculous. If Roger made the Exams exactly like the HWs, everyone who remotely tried to study would get 95+ on all the exams. For a COMM prereq, he obviously can't do this. This is not supposed to be an easy class.

Final thing, for some, accounting comes easy to them, for others, it's very hard. This is just the nature of the beast. I think that the most important thing to understand is to keep calm throughout the duration of the course -- your grade in Intro into Financial Accounting is not going to determine your future. And this sounds absurd to say, but to be honest people have been way too emotional/intense this semester about their grade in the class. For example, after the second midterm someone wrote on PIAZZA "I am really concerned about my future now, is there still a chance I can make it to comm school." In addition to this, apparently people have been emailing Roger complaints and berating him about how the course is unfair. This is all BS. People just need to calm down, sack up, and face the music. You may or may not get a good grade in this course, but I think the most important thing is to just grind through it and move on.

It's not that bad. Just don't procrastinate the work, study the practice/homework problems, read the questions carefully, and you'll be fine. Don't let the other reviews scare you out of taking the class.

To start, I will say that this class is doable for a lot of people. For many others, including myself, it was very challenging. However, having an online class is simply not the best way to learn this material for most people, despite how well they might have done grade-wise. It is sad that an intro accounting class creates this much stress and animosity among its students given how useful the content can actually be. The homework/practice problems are functionally irrelevant to your grade (something Martin never lets you forget in his weekly emails) and exams are definitely a step up from the homework/practice. That said, I did not think the exams in and of themselves were unfair. I think the most frustrating aspect of exams was that the material Martin gives you to study with is FAR easier than the content on the exam itself and if learning intricate concepts by reading a textbook alone is hard for you, you will likely struggle in this course. In regards Martin as professor, I don’t have much positive to say. His emails are rarely helpful and are often rather condescending. Overall, I can say I learned a lot but the course caused me an undue amount of stress, and I have never been more relived to finish a class.

Honestly just a pitiful class. The exams with proctorU just give you more testing anxiety. This class the biggest waste of a class since ive been here. Martin is just your average entitled white male tenured professor who gives zero shit about your academics. You go to ask how to do better and he just says you are dumb. His exams are like if you read the material in English then he asks questions on the exam in spanish. Also, connect doesn't work at least half of the time. Martin sends snarky emails telling us to not email him, and over shares about his persona life. Like I didn't need to know he got his gallbladder out for god sake, he isn't getting any pity here. Sure this class was hard when it was in person, but at least the professor cared about her students learning the content, not like this dude. If you take this class, plan on dropping out of comm because it'll do that to you and honestly make you want to jump off of a bridge because no matter how much work you put in, he just kills you on the exam anyways.

Never take this class if you don't have to. Chances are that you'll screw something up and get yelled at by the professor for being incompetent and that you shouldn't be taking accounting if you don't even understand the basic concepts. He's a horrible professor who will continue to torture his students for the rest of his time at UVA. If you were on the fence for pre-comm, don't wait until you have to take this class. I know plenty of people who had been eliminated from contention for the rat race to get into McIntire. Save yourself the time and headache from taking this course.

AHHAHAHAHAHA WE BACK!

This was the worst course I have ever taken at UVA. It is extremely disappointing that we pay thousands of dollars to attend this school and they still won't pay for a class this difficult to have a real/helpful professor. Roger Martin is simply the worst. He is the least helpful and accommodating person in this world. I put in endless hours each week reading the textbook and taking notes on the readings and still barely know the basic concepts. This class is DIFFICULT and it should be in person because there is no way to just teach yourself these concepts by reading a textbook. This man simply does not care about the success or knowledge of his students. No matter how hard you work he will say you are lazy and stupid. He only likes the students who do well (the select few). I relied on videos online to learn the concepts and worked endlessly to just pass this class. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS UNLESS YOU HAVE TO. It successfully weeds out an enormous amount of pre-comm students. Oh, and RIP to your GPA. This class destroyed my mental sanity this semester. Good luck, friends!

WARNING: this is a hot take. As you may have gathered from reading other truly scathing reviews: this class is hard; accounting, by nature, is hard, but blaming Professor Martin, complaining about the website being slow or the Proctors being rude, or even -- the worst I've seen -- criticizing the man for sharing the fact that he had to have surgery on his gallbladder and calling this "oversharing" is ABSOLUTELY pitiful, truly one of the most shameful things I've seen in my entire life.

While you may not have performed as well as you wanted to in the course, criticizing Prof. Martin and stomping your feet anonymously online is not going to change anything. If you didn't do well in this class and still want to go to the Comm School: great -- promise yourself to do better in Managerial and go talk to Prof. Martin about ways to improve. If you've realized it's not the right fit for you: thank Prof. Martin for showing you now instead of a year later when you're sitting in RRH unhappy.

Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, have some self-respect, and go on with the end of your semester without having to look back after you've calmed down in a couple weeks and wonder why you had to make it your personal duty to degrade Prof. Martin.

Every review you have read before this I agree with 100%. At the beginning, I did not think the material was too bad, until it came to the first midterm. I diligently studied and did the practice problems, expecting to to okay. I ended up with a C and I immediately knew this class was going to be tough. Following this, we received an email from Martin to the stating that people with low grades essentially aren't working hard enough. I replied back stating how I studied for the exam and how I truly felt prepared for it, and I asked for friendly advice on how to go about improving my study habits for the next exam. I received a reply with something along the lines "only a DEDICATED student would know how to work the problems on the exam, you should try and see how I could change practice problems and ask them from different angles". Leading up to the second exam, I changed my study habits and tried to make up my own problems that were harder than the ones given, but again, the second exam took its toll with extremely tricky and specific questions and I ended up with a borderline D/F on it. As the final approached, I knew I needed to do exceptional to have any chance at a good grade in the class. For about 6 days up to the final, I just ate, did accounting, and slept. By the end of this period of time, I HAD to be prepared, right? Wrong. Over 72 hours of studying in 6 days got me a C on the final. I cannot recommend a class any less than this one. If you want to do obscene amounts of work, having any sense of progress in learning ripped from you from terribly difficult exams and snarky emails, this class is for you! With all due respect, I do not think Martin is a bad guy, and I am sure he is a genius when it comes to accounting, but making exams this hard and deceptively tricky for a class that is 98% self-taught is just ridiculous. I do know people who have done well in this class, but the VAST majority of people I have talked to have had a similar experience to me.

While I’ll never say I enjoyed a single second of this class, I think a lot of people are being really hard on it. Was it fun? Absolutely not. But I will say that I learned a ton of stuff in this class and I know how to do accounting. Despite this, the class is incredibly fast paced and leaves very little time for recovery if you fall behind or don’t understand something, which I find to be a big issue. Also, taking accounting online is just ridiculous. The lack of actual teaching and guidance is unexcusable. I learned everything I know from reading a textbook. Roger made himself available in office hours, but I’m my opinion, that is not how a math based class should be taught, nor is it what I signed up for when coming to UVA (ESPECIALLY as a prereq for Comm School). Tests were slightly unfair, and the material at the end of the semester is very rushed. Also 90% of your grade is exams, meanwhile the homework and readings require about 6 hours a week. Classes like this are nearly impossible to get an A in. Despite doing fairly well overall in this class, I’m very disappointed with it.