Honestly this class was amazing, I know this class had such a bad rep from the earlier years, but it is much more organized now. Krista is honestly one of my favorite teachers from UVA and she was so approachable and caring to all the students. Since I took this during J-term, the class size was smaller, but it so doable and I HIGHLY recommend her since she was always available and thoughtful.

I took this fall 2020 online as a first year. DON'T let the reviews scare you into taking this class. This course is very manageable, just incredibly time consuming. I'm convinced Krista does not realize the amount of work she gives is excessive and believes this is our only class. However, that aside, it's not that bad and easy to pass with an A+ so long as you do the work.

There's a pre-recorded lecture to go along with the reading prior to each class. The pre-recorded lecture is based on her power points and technically you don't really need to read the textbook to understand the material. In the live lectures, she goes over a class example and the codes on SAS. Her coding files for each unit are actually organized and easy to sort through. There's a class check-in with each lecture that's normally content-based or asks you to do your own example. Not hard at all. You can find the answers to the content based questions in her power points or you can just ask her and she'll guide you to the answer.

There's one homework assignment with each unit (about 4 problems with each assignment) along with a lab. They're both very helpful in preparing for the other if you choose to do one before the other. For the labs, she randomly pairs you up with someone to work on it and if you and your partner both understand the codes/content, it doesn't take more than 2 hours to finish the lab. For the home work, it does take long but it can be done in a night. It's not hard at all to get above a 90/100 on each lab and homework.

My main complaints with Prof. Varanyak is that it's very obvious she's still kind of new to teaching (she graduated from grad school only a few years ago). She sends a bunch of bs emails and rarely replies to Piazza posts that are genuine questions. The TAs are the ones that reply to the Piazza posts but they give very conflicting answers most of the time so it doesn't even help. It's obvious that she's very disorganized - even in her pre-recorded lectures she somehow manages to find an error in her power point and fixes it on the spot. Sometimes she'll upload the wrong files and and re-upload the correct ones without letting anyone know. She doesn't even follow her own schedule that she set up and shared earlier with us sometimes either.

I'm glad that there aren't any exams in this class. There's two projects but they're SO time-consuming and you have to make sure you get GOOD project partners. If someone isn't doing their part, just report them right away. I was forced to do that with one of my partners. We were initially a group of three but became two since of them obviously didn't understand the material. My biggest piece of advice is to take this class with friends. It helps a lot!!!!!!!! #tCF2020

Didn't learn a ton, but this might be the first class I get an A+ in. The class is structured into 5 units which each have a lab (done in class with a partner) and a problem set. There were no exams, just 2 group projects that matched up with the course material well and if you got a good group then they were not much effort at all. You are programming in SAS which can get annoying especially since I have a CS background and SAS doesn't actually feel like coding more like just calculating. There is a SAS course that you have to complete but she walks you through all the code you need to know how to use in class so the SAS course isn't necessary to understand the material or pass the class. The structure of the class was kind of confusing since some days were mandatory and others weren't but the in-class lectures were much more helpful than the recorded lectures since she went through the code in class and the recorded lectures was just going through the slides. Most of the code you can copy and paste from her examples and change the name of the data set and it'll work. Don't be intimidated if you've never coded before. If you're a stat major, it's not bad but if you don't have to take it, I wouldn't.

Talk about a course that is much worse than it should be. Regression Analysis is actually a relatively interesting, important and easy-to-interpret topic compared to many other statistics courses. Unfortunately, Krista drags us through a crap load of repetitive busy work. The daily check-ins are obnoxious. On top of the projects, long assignments and labs, they seem like her way of forcing students to engage in her vague lectures. You can tell she doesn't have a great understanding of the content. Literally, everything takes more time than it should. Even her collab page feels like it's designed to waste time. Thanks for making multiple folders with the same title! I almost forgot to mention that she casually assigns an online SAS course that takes ~20 hours to complete. TA's are chill at least and the grading is lenient. I simply can't get past the astronomically high effort-to-knowledge ratio.

If you do not have to take this class, DO NOT take it while it is taught by Krista Varanyak. I do not think she did a good job at getting students to understand what she intended to. During class, most students get sleepy, and even though we tried our best to keep up with her, we still get lost in her vague instruction towards in-class activity and so on... The professor also responses to e-mails so slow that you could never get your questions answered on time. I know I might be a little bit emotional but I have to say this course is the worst course I have taken so far.

This class was a mess, to say the least. I am not being spiteful, as this feedback is coming from someone who will likely finish the class with a high A, possibly even an A+. Here it goes:

We are not in middle school. This class was taught as though we are a class of 6th graders who do not understand how to manage assignments or keep up with course material. Between Collab, Piazza, Gradescope, and daily email announcements, there is too much information coming at us that is completely unnecessary and draws students to start tuning everything out. Communications can and should be consolidated. Beginning with the quizzes, it seemed like they were more focused on definitions and memorization as opposed to problem-solving and critical thinking. There were 6 (!!) of them during the semester that just added a ton of stress and did not truly assess our ability to learn. We also had in-class assignments which were her way of taking attendance (15% of your final grade). These were absolutely worthless and made it so we had to come to class, even when listening to her lectures is pretty pointless. As for the problem sets, they were generally good but extremely repetitive. These can be cut down even further. My hand was sore after handwriting the first problem set, and having to write out the exact same 3-line interpretation, quite literally 30+ times. Type these out. Also, pretty much all of the answers were on Chegg, so do what you will with that info. In terms of labs, these were valuable, but need improvement in terms of execution. The main issue was that there was never enough time in class to finish the lab especially toward the beginning of the course. I would recommend removing the in-class assignments and replacing them with more time for each lab. Side note: On the lab with the football data from the eagles, there are points in the lab when you refer to 2017 data when it is from 2018 and vice versa (we looked up the team stats on google for each year to find this out). As for the projects, there are 2 and both done in a group (total of 45% of your final grade) so make sure to pick a good group. They're graded pretty easily but the second project has a "poster session" that involves a bunch of small and meaningless tasks (such as commenting on the projects of three other groups and responding to their comments) that are a waste of everyone's time.

There are also a bunch of extra credit assignments that require a lot of time for a maximum 1% boost to your final grade. Grading wise the class is fine, but the main point of this review is that this class was so poorly organized that it made me consider dropping a statistics major. If you do the work (assuming you manage to figure out what the hell is actually going on and sift through the bullshit in her emails), your grade will be fine. It will just take a lot out of you.

Let me start off by saying this course is not impossible. However, if you must take this class I urge you to pick a professor who is NOT Krista Varanyak. She is a young professor fresh out of grad school and it shows in her teaching methods. She assumes that students will know how to do things on SaS without giving any proper instruction. The format of her class is very disorganized and she is constantly changing the syllabus. In the beginning she gives you n SaS programming course to work on but it doesn't help you figure out SaS and really just becomes time-consuming. I wish I had dropped this class when I had the chance. One positive is that she doesn't give you exams, however the projects are so time-consuming and frustrating to work through that you are better off taking an exam. She makes the class much harder than it needs to be and makes you submit some form of assignment every single class, so it's not even like you could miss a class. It's too late to save myself, but I can still save those of you who haven't taken the class yet.

Previous reviews of this course made me very fearful of Krista's teaching, but she really exceeded my expectations. She tries her very best to make a sometimes dull subject interesting, and quite frankly I really like her. She is very helpful and extremely fair. Honestly, this class is really easy because Krista really wants everyone to succeed. I never read the textbook and found that I could be successful by just attending lectures. The HW sets are also very helpful, especially with regard to how to use SAS. The two exams are pretty easy because she gives you practice for them and you can use a cheat sheet. Additionally, she grades the projects very leniently. Overall, I would recommend this course to anyone with any interest in statistics/economics/business/any field that is highly quantitative/analytical because it is easy and the material taught is extremely applicable to the real world.

I could say that people who rate this course a low score because they did not put in much effort and still want an easy A. Professor Varanyak is helpful in office hours. I admit that there are 4 case studies during the semester and a final project. But the exam are open-book and she reviewed some important questions that may be shown on the exam with us. So, I say it is hard for you to not get a 90/100 higher on exams. As I knew so far, she tries to change her syllabus and make this course more interesting and less hard for students. A cutoff is 95%, but she gives extra credit for finishing course evaluation. For the Fall 2018 semester, the A is actually 93%. If you put in effort on your group case studies and write well notes for exams, you at least will get an A-. I believed most of our class was A.

Honestly some of these reviews are obviously from students who didnt show up to lecture or put in the necessary work. Not to sound like a smart-ass, but honestly the course wasn't bad at all. As a first year, I was nervous to jump into a 3000 level course my first semester, but honestly this course was so interesting that I have few regrets. I agree that the case studies (4 mini projects worth 20% of your grade) and homework (6 assignments worth 25% of your grade) could be a bit tedious, but they were graded pretty fairly-- the case studies were graded by her and were generally pretty easy to get an A on, the homeworks however took a while to be graded and seemed to be graded sort of subjectively-- probably my only critique of the course. Our first exam was open book and online, plus had 10 possible extra credit points... how people managed to not get an A honestly surprised me because the subject matter was not very difficult. In this course, you will have to get familiar with coding in SAS, something that scared me because I had little coding experience. However (contrary to what many people seem to be saying) she presented it in a relatively easy-to-follow manor, and even released her own solutions to the practice problems involving SAS so we could go over it after lecture... honestly seemed pretty nice. If you keep up with the coding as you go, it won't be hard. Honestly, if you remember proc reg you'll be fine lol. Overall, I would recommend taking this course. It introduces some really interesting regression topics and opens your eyes to the wider world of statistics.