ECON 3020

Professor Smirnyagin is a very knowledgeable person, but sometimes too knowledgeable. I went into Intermediate Macroeconomics thinking it would be a walk in the park, but I was met with the opposite.

Lectures are not mandatory, but sometimes they did feel pointless. I would get lost when he would present the slides, but when I read the textbook I understood what he was trying to say. It was a lot of content, but he did omit a lot in his slides that I think would have been helpful for understanding. About halfway through the semester, he stopped making slides and did the content on the board. At this point, I was even more confused, but going to my TA office hours helped a little bit.

His grading distribution should have been enough for me to take a different professor. It was 30% HW, 30% Midterm, and 40% Final. We have 7 problem sets in the semester with 1 being dropped. The HW at times would take me a good amount because some of the content on them were just not taught and he believed that we had some knowledge of it. There were also times when it seemed that there was a miscommunication with the grader and the TA that would host office hours as I would go to OH and get one answer for a question but that ended up being wrong in the eyes of the grader.

For the midterm, he allowed one page of notes front and back. I will say the midterm was the easiest of the course as most of the questions were from the practice midterm he gave us. The format is the same as his HW with 3 sections: True/False, Short Answer and Long-Answer.

For the final exam, he allowed two pages of notes front and back. This was probably the worst part of the class. The content was far from anything that we learned in class or was shown in the textbook. It was also very different from the practice exam given. It was like he expected us to know a lot of things beyond the scope of the course itself. Instead of 3 hours, we were given two hours with basically no one finishing the exam. There ended up having to be a ginormous curve for grades after the final exam grades were released.

Overall, I do think Professor Smirnyagin is a great person. He tried to keep us engaged in the lecture and cracked a few jokes here and there. With that being said, I do not think he is the best professor. I feel like you can learn and gain more from a different professor in this course. With this being the first time he taught the course at the University, he does have a lot of work to do to make the content more fair and easy for students to understand.

Take it with Westerfield if you can. Otherwise, survivable as a course. Your grade is by and large determined by the midterm and final exam. The midterm is probably the most reasonable test you'll ever take - it is exactly like the homework, and it's incredibly fair. Unfortunately for the general public, it seems that he thought he was too gentle.

Up until this point, he worked largely off slides which really helped make the material clear. Once he started just writing on the board variables without names would appear, and although he'd ask if anyone had questions rarely would anybody ask them.

The final exam we took at the end of the semester was the worst exam I've ever taken at UVA. After extensive studying, the exam content was far from what we'd learned in class, going far far beyond. At the time I was well set for an A in the class, but given that it was worth 40% of the class and I got a 55%... I was not alone. Walking out, everyone's expressions could be summarized by a single 4 letter word. The curve ended up being aggressive, but we did get an email where he expressed his disappointment.

If you can avoid it, take it with the other professor. Yes, this was his first semester, so if you're looking at this far in the future maybe things have improved but at least as of now I cannot recommend this course.

The worst part was that other than the final it really was an interesting and largely engaging class. It's just unacceptable that the final is how it is, your work in the early semester loses so much meaning.