STS 4600

At the beginning of the semester, Prof. Baritaud emphasizes that she wants to help you improve your writing and speaking skills, as well as help you get through writing the STS research paper. In reality, she talks at you for hours during lecture, assigns writing assignments, takes weeks to grade those assignments, then returns them with sparse, unhelpful feedback. Often the only feedback given is surface level. On an average paper, her comments consist of two one-word annotations, one single sentence annotation, and a smattering of text highlighted with absolutely no explanation or comment. Gems of actual comments she wrote include "?????" and "BAD," with no additional information or actionable feedback. Over the course of the semester I have received two comments on the actual content of my writing, both of which were unspecific and unhelpful. Her expectations are ridiculously high and her grading is inconsistent at best. It's a common occurrence for her to grade a draft and not have any comments, only to dock points for the same thing on the final version. Her lectures are tangential, uninspiring, and truly challenging to sit through. It does not feel like she has taught me anything I couldn't get from the textbook, and my writing has not benefited at all either. She frequently drops hints that she may bump grades ("you can start with a D and get an A- by the end of the class, my math tends to get bad around then"), but this just reinforces the feeling that she cares nothing about substance and grades based on her whims. She also frequently apologizes for not returning grades when she says she will, sometimes missing her own grading deadlines 3-5 times on a given assignment, and explains that she's busy, yet she is not understanding of the fact that we are busy as well. She expects to give us close to nothing, and for us, in return, to produce work that meets her unclear, inconsistent, arbitrary standards, without feedback of how to actually reach those standards. Her expectations differ greatly from other professors, so those who did not have her for STS 4500 are at a great disadvantage (though this is arguably a problem with the STS department in general). By far the worst, least helpful, least understanding, and most pretentious professor I have had during my time at UVA. Save yourself some confusion, frustration, anger, and tears by avoiding this class at all costs.