MATH 3340

Petrov is probably the worst professor I've had at UVA. He seems like he does not want to be teaching the course at all at often seems annoyed when students ask questions. He is a very lazy and disorganized lecturer and seems to just go over the material just off the top of his head without preparation. This only became worse when the course went online. He started uploading like 2-3 asynchronous lectures a week that totaled to maybe 2 hours, but then we also just had a mandatory meeting on Thursdays that were the regular class time of 1:15 or longer. For reference, a week of lectures should only be 2 and a half hours total. It would be fine if his lectures were any good but they were even worse than they were in person. He somehow managed to take sections from our textbook that would take maybe like 20-30 minutes to read and then would record a 1 hour lecture that covered less material in a way more confusing way. But you couldn't afford to just read the textbook because he would sometimes include material not included in the textbook that would show up on quizzes and exams.

The online exams were hell. The first in person exam was super super easy. The second exam, which was online, wasn't too bad, but he made the computations really long and tedious since it was open note. The final was terrible. It was 9 problems, and most of them were substantially more difficult than what we had done all year. One of the questions included a topic outside of the textbook that he brought up in lecture except he didn't even complete a full example problem when he went over it. That final took me around 12 hours to complete.

The homeworks are inconsistent. Some take maybe an hour while others can take 4-5, depending on how poorly he covered the material. The worst one was the very last one which took 12 hours because he decided it would be a good idea to cover 2 whole chapters in a week.

On top of just Petrov just being an objectively terrible professor, he was very inconsiderate to me personally. I switched into his class close to the add/drop deadline because I had to resolve a scheduling issue first and missed the first two weekly quizzes. I asked if I could make them up or have them dropped, but he said that it was my fault because I didn't show enough interest to sign up for the class originally. On the syllabus, it said he would drop one quiz, but that still meant I would start off with a 0 for a quiz and also not be able to drop one later. Although it was annoying at the time, I didn't push too hard cause I could still make it up at that point with a quiz every week and quizzes only counting for around 7% of our grade. I only got to take 3 quizzes before COVID hit and Petrov decided not to give quizzes anymore since we were online. On the first quiz I took, I only studied the textbook cause his lectures were ass, but one of two questions was on something that was exclusively covered in lecture, so I got a 50 on it. The other two quizzes were fine, but my quiz average at this point was like a 60% even with the dropped quiz. I asked him again towards the end of the semester if I could just drop the two quizzes I missed given that I didn't get a chance to bring my grade up because of the pandemic. This asshole still tells me no and said that I'd be fine because I did well on the first two exams anyways. I ended having to get a full letter grade higher on the final (the one that was a 12 hour nightmare) just to get the grade I would have gotten had I not switched in the class late.

TLDR: Professor is an inconsiderate asshole with disorganized and confusing lectures.