ANTH 3129

There were interesting moments of this class, but overall I was not impressed. It was probably the least anthropology-like anthro. class I've ever taken. Shepherd is a nice guy and is smart, but he is not cut out to teach. His exams were awkward and his lectures could be extremely boring. He puts out a TON of info. on his slides in class, so taking notes is only really possible if you can type really fast. This class has the potential to be really interesting, but not with Shepherd teaching it.

Absolutely terrible. Shepherd speaks in a monotone voice throughout the entire lecture, and can skip unreasonably fast past slides that have a lot of information on them. The slides are not posted to Collab, so don't think that you'll be able to get notes that way. You'll be out of luck. Unfortunately though, the exams are extremely detail based, but only specific details seems to apply out of many possible answers that would otherwise satisfy the question. Not only that, but the course material itself leaves a lot to be desired. The readings are extremely outdated and not supplemented by current material on the subjects. Most of the 'analysis' comes down to putting peoples' decisions based on their economic consequences- the decision to have children is literally put into terms of how valuable of an 'economic asset' they are to their parents. Overall, this is not an adequate representation of what an anthropology course can or should be at UVa. I wouldn't recommend it for majors or non-majors alike.

This is a terrible class, and definitely not a good representation of the rest of the Anthropology department. Not only does Shepherd assign an unreasonable amount of reading (30+ pages a night), but his lectures are super boring and he doesn't post his PowerPoint slides on Collab. That, in addition to his incredibly difficult tests--which are described as 'short answer' with 'one essay'--are graded very harshly. If you don't list literally every detail on the readings, you won't get a good grade. Shepherd's lectures are monotonous, boring, and lack the analysis and discussion I was hoping to get from this course. A real disappointment and waste of my time.

I'm an anthropology major and this is the worst anthro course I have ever taken. By far. He is incredibly boring, and lectures straight from the reading. He puts none of his lecture slides up. And what he teaches is out of date, with no critical analysis. He expects really detailed answers on the tests and it is no longer open notes. I never thought that I would dislike an anthropology class this much.

This is the most boring class I have EVER taken in my life. I don't want to exagerate anything but this class literally made want to blow my brains out. Shepherd talks with this low monotone mumble that you learn to ignore because you are too busy trying to copy everything he has on the slides (a lot). I never did any of the reading, I never read over my notes and I never really paid attention in class. I ended up with an A. There are two midterms and a final all of which are open notes. If you want an easy while being bored out of your mind take this class. If not run far far away and never look back.

I'm not an Anthropology major and this was the first ANTH class I had ever taken, but I thought the information was actually pretty interesting. The worst part was that Prof. Shepherd didn't post the powerpoints online, so you had to come to class and type/write quickly to get everything. There were 2 midterms and a final and although the readings were kind of helpful sometimes, the tests were definitely focused on the lectures, and he went over the important parts of the readings during lecture. Overall, it wasn't a very difficult class.

Interesting class and I learned a lot. There is quite a lot of reading, but pretty engaging.