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.

This class is difficult, but more due to the fact that you are "on your own" since it is online. Professor Martin is a tough Professor, but at the same time, this class is a weed out class, so that should be expected. The structure of the class is simple: read a chapter each week (takes about 1.5-2 hours), then do practice/hw problems (another 1.5-2 hours) each week. All in all, if you keep up with the work throughout the semester, you will get the grade you DESERVE. With that said, unless you think you will be really good at accounting, don't expect an A in this class. It is a hard class--not because the material is too dense and confusing to understand--but because you have to have the self discipline to learn everything on your own and master it.

Also, If you think comm school is for you, use this class as an opportunity to find out. If you get a D in this class, comm school probably wasn't meant for you in the first place. good luck!

It is absolutely ridiculous that the tuition we pay doesn't go towards an actual in-person class, but an ONLINE McIntire PREREQUISITE course where we have to teach ourselves everything you need to know about Financial Accounting and more. Roger Martin is without a doubt brilliant and intelligent in this subject. However, he is the most unhelpful, unfair, and least understanding professor I have ever had. The readings, practice, and homework problems are a good BASE for merely understanding the material. However, when it comes to the exams, Professor Martin will put questions that take everything 10 steps further and will not provide any practice problems that accurately reflect the difficulty of the questions we will see on the exams. For the first two exams, I redid all of the assigned problems we had for homework, re-read each chapter, did the review problems he gave us, and still got absolutely DESTROYED by the exams. Although I understood all of the material, the ridiculous questions he throws at us make you second-guess your answers/methods of solving them and you ultimately just don't get the points unless you're lucky. It is also very easy to miscalculate a single number and lose a ton, if not all, of the points on a question because of the unreasonable weighting of each question. And it doesn't help that the "Review Questions" he gives us for the exams are exactly the same as problems we have already done. or even easier. I, and many other students I believe, would've performed much better in this course if Professor Martin had given us more difficult problems to review with that are more representative of the types of questions he asks. Overall, I suffered a lot in this course and definitely had multiple mental breakdowns and blows to my self-worth throughout the semester only to end with a grade that definitely does not look good to McIntire. Hopefully the structure and preparation Professor Martin provides in future Financial and Managerial Accounting courses will improve.

Basically, you self-teach accounting by paying 100 bucks to read a textbook and 15 more for Chegg (trust me, you'll need it).

Your grade will not reflect the sheer amount of work you put in every week. Reading the textbook takes hours. Doing the practice problem takes several hours more. But doing all that, putting in all your sweat and tears and all, is about 18% of your grade. Not to mention that there are sometimes repeats and errors in the practice and homework problems. For a Comm school online course that we paid for, that is designed to build the foundation for our understanding of accounting -- seriously, this is not acceptable.

It's the exams, the 2 midterms and 1 final, that dictates about 80% of your grade. The exam problems are much harder and tricky. And most of the time, it's a fill-in-the-blank, so no partial credits are given. If your fingers trip up typing an answer, thats like 4% of your grade gone. Also, I wouldn't suggest doing the practice exams as the professor suggests because they do not accurately reflect the difficulty of the midterm or final. You're better off just drilling the t-accounts and the what affects what in your brain.

Unless you're pre-comm, avoid this class. Your mental and physical health will thank you. But for those who are stuck with taking this pre-req, what's the best way to survive? I'd say, pretty much sucking up all the busy work, study hard, but pray to Jesus, and hope that the accounting God is on your side during exams.

I agree with the review before this one. The class is hard; theres no two ways about that. But if you put in the work as he recommends, putting in a little every day, anyone can get an A in this class. I did poorly on the first two exams because I didn't listen to Professor Martin and I thought I could just coast through. For the final, I grinded for like two weeks and ended up getting a 95%. Overall, I'll probably end up with a B, but I definitely don't blame the professor for that. He works really hard to keep this course effective, answering countless emails and piazza questions every day. If you want to succeed, take what he says seriously. Don't cram every Sunday night because you won't get the repetition you need to effectively learn this stuff. I learned that the hard way; don't be like me lol. If you're not prepared to put in a lot of work, just don't waste your time with this class

This review is going to have a different point of view than most other ones listed. This is a difficult class, no doubt about it. I found it to be challenging, as a pre-requisite for McIntire School of Commerce should be. The Professor holds his students to a high standard and has never lied about that. Most of the very negative reviews are students taking out their frustration because they did not get the grade that they wanted. While I understand this, and I empathize with their struggle, I do not think it is fair for them to completely blame the Professor for their final result.I think this class is like most other difficult classes at UVa, you get out of it what you put into it. I say this not because I was one of the few people with an A, absolutely not. I personally ended up doing worse than I had hoped and I feel badly about it. But the blame that students are putting on Professor Martin here is not totally fair. This is not to say that there aren't things I wouldn't change about the way the course was set up, I would. But at the end of the day, you have to take responsibility for your actions. For a majority of people that took this class, they got the grade their work deserved. That's all. Maybe accounting is just not for you - it isn't something that comes easily to everyone. Maybe this course IS in fact harder than other Intro accounting courses (it most likely is, actually) but that's what you get for trying to get into one of the most prestigious undergraduate business schools in the country. Nobody said it would be easy.

This was an abhorrent class, do NOT take it unless you are the greatest accountant the world has ever seen. The amount of work overall is insane and the professor is completely unhelpful. The final exam is the biggest piece of confusing garbage to ever exist, it can be best described as cruel and unusual punishment. The other reviews for Fall 2018 go into more depth about the class structure and uselessness of the professor, I just wanted to let everyone know that this class will screw up your GPA, mental health, and future plans.

Don't take unless you are pre-comm. Very time consuming class but material isn't that difficult if you put the time in. Exams are a lot harder than practice and homework problems that you do because they are worded differently and are more complex. Also stressful because there is rarely opportunities for partial credit on exams since many answers are multiple choice or filling in the blank with a number.

Probably should've known from the first passive-aggressive email from Professor Martin that this wasn't going to be a good one. He kindly recommended that we spend 6-9 hours a week on the chapter, to properly master. Little did we know that Roger was underestimating. Aside from his poor estimation skills, Roger has a knack for sending remarkably passive-aggressive emails, getting mad when the student's that he (doesn't) teach don't do well on his exams. To make matters worse, he decided it was a great idea to warn students days before the final that "The final will be hard." Thanks Roger. Hadn't occurred to me that your final would be hard. Additionally, you best not email him "lacking civility." While Roger will email you complaining, and lamenting, that his students aren't working hard enough, or properly, you best not email him with any complaints. Roger Martin simply isn't a professor. He's a manager. He sits in his office, posts the occasional video here or there, and hopes to god that students don't need his help (he'd rather you just leave him alone). I'm sure Professor Martin is very good at accounting, I'm sure he teaches upper level accounting courses, and students may even praise him. However, he didn't teach this one. He didn't even create a good course. He had students read a $70 textbook, and pretended like he was teaching us. Aside from nothing, it's a tremendously disappointing class in one of the more important McIntire prerequisite classes.

Whoever decided to bully Roger back in the day has created an absolute monster. Roger is not an educator but a facilitator and has little regard for students. If we were on the Titanic he would have taken the last lifeboat on his own with a hearty "lmao y'all bouta drown. "There is little to no instruction in this course with TA's that don't know much more than you do. Don't take this class my friend, but if you must I would recommend taking some padding classes because you're in for a major tanking in your GPA. Shout out to Roger for sending an email out to say hey don't email me because many of you "lack civility." Roger has a major bee in his bonnet. If anything it will be a semester to bond with your fellow students down in the trenches.