SPAN 4700

one of my favorite classes at uva. Gies is an amazing professor. a good deal of memorization required but everything is very straightforward.

Professor Gies is fun, but he takes the class seriously. You will have to put in a decent amount of work to succeed in this class. He assigns 3 movies to watch over the course of the semester, and there is either a quiz on them or a discussion about them in which you may be called on to discuss them the next class.
He assigns 10-15 pages of reading from the textbook per class and gives pop quizzes on them a few times a semester (all but one he told us about ahead of time, though). There are two partial exams and a cumulative final. They involve map feature IDs, image IDs, and one or two essays. You also have to prepare a PowerPoint presentation (slides and outline) on a Spain-related subject as a final project.
Additionally he may tease you/pick on you but he's good-natured about it. He is nice and while sometimes his expectations are little high they're not ridiculously so.

This was a pretty straight forward class. Three tests (the last test is your final), pop quizes on the reading every so often, and one final project which wasn't bad at all. Gies is a great professor; really enthusiastic.