COMM 2020

Out of my 4 semesters at UVA. This has been the worst professor I have encountered. Apart from her classes having no structure, she tends to go on random tangents about her life and attempts to convey concepts using horrible examples. Taking Prof. Erickson's class last semester, has emphasized how unstructured all of Middleton's classes are. Her reluctance to write anything on the boards makes it extremely hard to take notes in class as she typically lectures sitting down on the table. Every time I am in class, I wonder how she is still being employed by an educational institution given her complete ineffectiveness at teaching. Expect to teach yourself Managerial Accounting all semester.

If you look up scatterbrain, you might find a picture of Middleton. She is very nice and generally means well but none of it goes in the right direction. Not just errors during lecture, she gives out tons of handouts for chapter outlines, homework answers and her Happy Days hat company but all are full of errors so there are bi-weekly correction emails. The course itself is pretty simple and boils down to knowing 1 or 2 concepts per chapter and doing the basic algebra off of them. Lecture attendance is of no value other than turning in the homework which is about every other class, the book is important to understanding the concept of each chapter and any other small thing comes straight from the outline she gives. Homework will go from really easy and simple to very long or challenging, with connect plus and rounding madness (23.14=24 in one example they found this semester) and a few of the book questions will stretch out into 2 hours of adding and subtracting numbers.

The workbook resources she gives (while having a few errors) are great use in preparing for the midterms and finals. The practice test is very close to the real thing and you can very easily feel prepared for the test. If you care at all you can get a good grade in this class pretty easily but could have been much better if Middleton seemed prepared.

Professor Middleton makes it very difficult to learn managerial accounting. She assigns an unecessary amount of homework and goes off on unecessary tangents when someone asks a question in class. I would not recommend her as a professor.

Middleton is probably, if not definitely the worse professor I've ever had at UVA. I and all of my friends taking the course together only took is as a COMM School pre-req, as does everyone else but she is truly a terrible teacher. She apparently almost got fired last semester and it doesn't surprise me. You don't learn a single thing from going to class except for learning about her life stories/realizing she's crazy. All she does every class is go over the written HW that basically no one does. The only useful part of coming to class is picking up the handouts that have outlines of each chapter, and the HW answers if you need those. She makes the final very long and not very representative of the other midterms, so it's very tough to study for. In the end, I and all my friends had to learn basically 100% of the material on our own through the textbook and the review problems she posts online. Don't take this class if you don't have to. Ck

I'd highly recommend this class if you want to try and teach yourself managerial accounting for a semester. As a person, Middleton is great. As a professor, she's easily the worst I've had while at UVA. To start, she essentially only reviews textbook homework in class. For the most part, nobody does it because if you sat down and actually tried, it would take 2.5 hours. It's only graded on completion. Plus, as Middleton has said herself, it's not a good way to learn or study for tests. She rarely lectures. When she does, she just reads off of handouts that she gives to students at the start of class everyday. You can expect emails at least twice a week correcting countless typos and wrong information that she puts on the handouts. She's been doing teaching for 37 years (or so she claims), so I guess I was wrong in thinking it reasonable to expect error-free information. It's hard to study for a test when the review material that she wants you to use and learn is straight-up wrong. She has gone so far as to change answers on the study guide from the right answer to the wrong answer, saying that she did it to "avoid confusion" which literally makes no sense at all. Also, she has horrible ADD and can't keep focus for more than 2 minutes at a time. She started the first day class by saying that that she had trouble paying attention, and I thought she was kidding. She quickly showed me that I could not have been more wrong. My friend has a theory that Comm School intentionally hired an incompetent professor to see which prospective students could teach themselves accounting and succeed with no instruction. After taking this class, I think my friend it right. The good news is that the material is not terribly difficult, and Middleton is entertaining as a person, in part because of how ridiculous she is. For those of you who need to take this class for Comm School, I'm sorry. For those of you who don't need this class, I warned you.

I'm just hear waiting for the reviews tearing her up. I did think Middleton was a cool person though.

Really just a bad professor. She actually cares so I feel bad writing negative things about her but her teaching strategy is non-existent. If she would just do more relevant practice problems and explain concepts and key formulas in class it would be so much better. She literally just sits up at her desk and fills out a sheet for some long problem that is not indicative of something we would see on the tests, and students eventually caught on and stopped showing up to class. I tried showing up to every class, but I can saw with 100% confidence that I never got anything out of going to class.

The final was also absurdly long with 64 questions. The financial final was 40 and these problems took about the same amount of time per problem, but 24 added questions made it so nobody truly finished or had time to think over the tricky problems.

While Mary Middleton has her flaws, she really, really cares about her students. Even though she is confused on the proper way to teach them (which most other reviews have pointed out), she does want to help you. A few of her tactics (purposefully changing answers to prevent "confusion," thus contradicting the book) are outright absurd, but she is very good at answering in-class questions. I believe that Professor Middleton is a great teacher in a small classroom, discussion-based environment. I'm not sure she realizes that students are afraid to ask questions in a class of 200 and so she isn't as effective.

So, from what I can tell, this course changed from Fall 2015 for the worse. Whether that's because of the increase in class size or the re-tweaking of the class, I'm uncertain. The reality of the course is that almost all previous reviews are going to be VERY HARD to accurately use to judge the upcoming semester, so read them cautiously. If the reviews prove anything. it's that she's variable, equally likely to switch from making a class that's unfair to making a class that's just right.

Personally, I found her lectures boring and mostly irrelevant, except the scenarios that she shares a anecdote on something that may be on a test you wouldn't know about otherwise. Anyone who takes this class must realize that it's definitely a self-teaching course, but in this regard, the materials she gives you are incredibly useful, so props to her for that.

If I wasn't a Comm student, I would have never taken the class, even if I did find it rather intuitive

I found this class to be actually interesting. Prof. Middleton made an effort to improve her class for the better and I think that it truly helped. She gave us lots of practice problems, which I felt left us well prepared for the midterms. Both midterms were reasonable and the homework is not too bad since it is graded on completeness, not correctness. She gave us an outline for each chapter and other handouts to help explain the concepts. I think what she did to improve the class this semester was great. I did a lot better in this class than I did in Financial.

The one thing that I will say is that the final was absolutely ridiculous. The final was not any where near the same difficulty level as the midterms, and I believe it was incredibly unreasonable..