COMM 2020

0/2 Roger. Disgrace of a professor and class. I hesitate to even call him a teacher because you teach yourself EVERYTHING. Exams are full of curve balls that we have never seen before, even with the countless hours we spend doing reading, practice problems, and homework problems each week (which may I add, count for essentially nothing of your final grade). Roger even failed to provide a legitimate practice test for the managerial accounting final. Only some multiple choice questions which were simply nothing like the final exam questions, especially since majority of the questions were NOT multiple choice. Accounting is so important down the road and many say it is like learning a new language, so why on earth is a class that can be so valuable being taught like this at one of the best schools in the nation. So sad, needs to be changed and Roger Martin needs to learn how to help his students rather than trying to trick them with every single exam question.

Both financial and managerial accounting with Martin online has been the absolute worst experience at UVA so far. Not only does this class have about 4x more work than a regular class, but the exams are nearly impossible to do well on unless you are an accounting god or have prior knowledge. The exams are literally designed for you to fail: littered with deceptive and tricky questions and the exams cover an obscene amount of content to the point where it is extremely difficult to remember it all. Good luck remembering around 20 formulas for the final. If you are pre-comm you just have to suck it up and take it. If you aren't, absolutely DO NOT take this class.

After a whole semester of financial accounting and 2 exams in managerial, I am honestly sick and tired of the way Roger writes his exams. He says things like "none of the material will be new to you" or "the topics are the same" before the exam. Sure, many of the questions are similar to what we have done. But there are quite a few curveball questions worth a hefty part of the total exam points that we have never seen before. He also likes to tell students to "think about different ways I could ask the same question". If I were able to think of the ways in which Roger asks some of his ridiculous exam questions, I think I would drop out of college right now and become an accounting professor myself. I don't understand why he refuses to test us on the material we spend so long preparing for. Convinced he gets enjoyment out of tricking us on every single exam with questions that do not reflect anything we teach ourselves from the textbook, practice problems, homework problems, or practice exam questions he gives us right before the tests. Do not take this class for fun.

Why does he create exams that are designed to make students lose points with tricks? Why does he not test students on what they've practiced through his material? Why are the hours and hours of work I spend on reading, practice, and homework given negligible weight? Definitely don't recommend unless you're applying to Comm, and even then I suggest you take it spring semester so your grade doesn't affect your chances of getting into Comm

Unless you are pre-comm, I would avoid this course. And if you are pre-comm then I suggest you take it the spring semester you are applying for the school so they don't see the grade. The readings are pretty easy and quick to get through but the homework are very tedious. If you start them beforehand and get help from the TAs and possibly get it checked by them you will get an A for the hw section. But the exams are always curveballs. No matter how much you study, even if you have memorized how to do each practice and homework question be ready for a surprise score. The practice questions, hw questions, and the readings are very straightforward but the exam questions are very twisted and its really hard to link what you have learned to what the exam is asking you without realllly deep thought. And the weight increasing with each exam really doesn't help your grade. The class is also completely online but they do have office hours but I felt that the material and the resources never prepared you for the exams and that taking the class in person is a better option. But unfortunately, it's only online which really sucks. The class used to be a joke when it was offered in class but after he made it online it became super hard. And Roger Martin is basically non-existent as a professor except for the annoying emails he sends each week and the videos hes in on collab. You have to learn everything from the textbook.

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAA TRASH

Hey Roger, as you cackle with glee as Cs from your exams roll in, here's a couple of things you should know. First, you are a lazy prick. Why are you lazy? Because you sit in your office and answer emails and piazza questions all day long and somehow McIntire still believes you deserve a six-figure salary. Furthermore, when students email you, it seems to be the case that you have the thinnest skin on the mf planet. You'll reply with sarcasm, belittle our emails by finding "uncivil" components of them, and sit back and congratulate yourself on how good you are at teaching. Why are you a prick? It's simple, really. You REFUSE to prepare your students for your exams. That has become very very clear. You save the hardest questions for the exams every single time. Why not give us hard questions as we study for the exam? would that really be the end of the world? Would it be such a terrible world to live in if your students' mental health didn't deteriorate? Our mental health deteriorates because you force us to look like idiots. Whenever exams scores are obscenely low, you say stupid things like "oh you should have studied harder" or "I guess you're not a good student" or (my personal favorite) "you should have spent more time in the chapters". See - that's the best part. you say we should spend 6-9 hours on every chapter. I spent 9 hours on every chapter. Were the results good? absolutely not. You create false expectations and we get our hopes up, and then those hopes get crushed every single time you give us an exam. You make us feel like idiots for NO GOOD REASON. So how about you do what you're paid to do and actually teach? The standards are very low in terms of online classes, but somehow you manage to never meet those standards. How about instead of patting yourself on the back for making students miserable, you actually give us a chance to prepare for your exams? Also, maybe consider the fact that you're not a good teacher? After all, a teacher is supposed to give students the opportunity to have CONTROL over their grade. In the absence of control, the teacher is clearly terrible at their job. If the amount of work students put in to preparing for your exams has very little effect on the outcome, you are the problem. I know you'll never read this but honestly I don't even care anymore. You live in a world where students don't have any other classes besides accounting, and I'd hate to be a part of that sad little world. Enjoy the well-deserved hatred of every student who ever takes this class with you!

Roger Martin is a prick. He’s one of those professors that acts like you should be grateful he’s even giving you the time of the day. On top of that, this class is completely self taught, which you may or may not like. What I found to be annoying is that you could study and understand how to do all of the practice or homework problems but then when it came to the test Martin would pull some new concept out of thin air that he’d expect you to make connections with. In a normal classroom setting where you’re actually being lectured, maybe you’d be able to make those connections because you’d have a deeper understanding of the content. But on an online course where you’re pretty much on your own, it’s pretty hard to do that. However, if you’re taking this course it’s probably because you’re pre-comm, so suck it up and take it I guess.

I’d say how well a student does in this course largely depends on how he or she feels about online classes. Personally, I like to teach myself and work independently so I enjoyed the course. However, if you prefer in-person demonstrations, asking the instructor questions, or structured coursework, this class might be a struggle.

Full disclosure: I got an A, but only because of the curve. I'm sort of neutral about the class overall, but there are definitely some problems with it. You will be teaching yourself pretty much the entire course from the textbook and practice problems/outside resources. I actually like this about the class, because I find the vast majority of the time professors don't actually add any value, and at the end of the day they can't learn the material for you; the online format spared me the annoyance of having to go to class just to browse reddit. Fortunately, the textbook was actually great for the most part, and the online practice problems were good at starting easy and getting really hard by the end of the assignment, which I felt prepared me well for exams. HOWEVER: there were some points in the later chapters (looking at you, Standard Costing and Variances) that were written HORRIBLY, to the point where you had to Google just to find out what the hell it was saying, and several places where the FORMULAS WERE STATED WRONG. I am sure that dozens of students were hurt on the final by the editing, and it could have cost them a letter grade. In terms of homework, you have probably around 7 hours a week, and I felt at the beginning that some of the expectations were unclear. I got a zero on the first two "reading" assignments because I didn't know that I had to click this tiny icon and answer tons of asinine questions about the material, but I figured it out eventually. I would seriously recommend starting the homework well in advance of the deadline, because for every single assignment without fail, I tried to read the chapter and do all the problems at 7pm the night it was due (11:59pm) and ended up with an 80% average on the homework overall, because sometimes the material would click and I would breeze through it, and other times I would get stuck and frantically answer the shortest questions to try to get as many points as possible once I realized I was screwed. Not fun. I would have had over a 93% average before the curve if I had just started earlier. TESTS: I thought the first test was easy and got like a 99% because it was a mix of calculation and conceptual problems just like the homework. On the second exam, which I thought was MUCH harder, it was 100% calculation questions which sort of blindsided me, and I ended up frantically racing the clock to finish and ended up with an A-, despite really knowing the material. I heard through the grapevine that the average on the second exam was about a 75%, which does not surprise me and explains what had to have been at least a 1.5% curve on our final grades. The final was almost all calculation questions as well, but overall I felt that it wasn't quite as hard as the second exam. For reference, my study style involves completely forgetting the material after I finish the homework on it, feeling completely unprepared and having a level of knowledge that would land me a 20% on the exam until like three days before, and then relearning all the material in a matcha-fueled binge that could easily not work out. TL;DR: Terrible depression-induced study habits landed me an A because everyone else did terribly, probably due to the lack of a teacher and errors in the textbook.