COMM 5450

Very difficult course. Lots of memorization involved with the course material. Porter is a phenomenal professor who makes sense of the material. But because of the dryness and sometimes vagueness of the material, you can really get lost in the weeds. The textbook is fine and Porter provides very comprehensive notes. Exam 1 is easy-okay; Exam 2 is difficult. You can defer all exams and just take the final, which will then count for over 50% of your grade.

Professor is a great professor! This material is a littler dry but she makes it as interesting as she can, which is much appreciated! She does not collect homework but doing the homework when it is assigned makes studying for the tests much easier.

If you're taking this class, you probably have to for the CPA. However, it really is not a hard class at all if you know how to keep up with the work! Basically, Porter will give you lecture notes each class - you need to take notes on these and fill out all of the examples. There is no turned-in homework, but each week there is a multiple choice quiz on Blackboard that is kind of a pain. It's 10 questions, and you have 3 tries. It's completely open note/open book, but she designs them so that they ask about the little things (she says she does this so that she doesn't have to ask nitpicky stuff on the tests). So basically, in order to do super well on these quizzes, read the chapter beforehand, read through the lecture notes, and go through the homework problems. Then, when you have an idea of where each topic is mentioned in the book/notes, take the quiz and refer back to the topic of the question to check your answer! It is not hard, it just takes a bit of time and is kind of a pain. For the tests, if you have done the work each week for the quiz, you should barely have to do any studying! She lets you have a cheat sheet (2 sides of a paper), so just write everything you can on those and the tests should be super easy! All of the questions on the test are the same format as one you have seen before - most likely on the lecture notes! So, it's really not hard at all. You can also elect to not take either midterm (or just one of them), and the extra points will be allocated to your final. Don't do that!! It's not a good idea because it will seem super overwhelming to catch up on extra material.