CS 3205

This course was unfun and tedious, do not recommend

If you're really passionate about drawing, wasting paper, unclear instructions, and spending a couple of hours writing nonsense paragraphs, this class is for you. This class was seriously useless and a waste of time. I'm the type of person who usually doesn't mind doing busywork however this whole entire class was basically just busywork. Additionally, the professor graded quite harshly. All the project guidelines had 2 different set of instructions that each said different things which made things extremely difficult to determine what you had to do. Furthermore, the TA's and professor would take points off for things they never mentioned in the rubric/in class and for other arbitrary reasons. For example, during our final presentation the professor took off a decent amount of points for making eye contact with him. For the actual projects itself, I have never done so much drawing and writing for one class. You literally have to write paragraphs on paragraphs and draw everything out to get a decent grade, which is still difficult as it is unclear what exactly they're looking for to grade. All in all, this class requires some serious bullshitting.

This class was the woat!! I literally cannot believe I wasted an entire semester on learning nonsense.. the textbook was essentially useless, lectures just repeated everything in the textbook or defined random UI buzzwords, and concepts were never really explained.. I literally feel like I walked out learning less than I did before lol. The worst part of this course was the professor himself. Not to be mean but he was pretty unreceptive to class feedback despite asking for it several times and would always ignore questions and would literally come for students' necks over everything. Honestly the sexist remarks he made at the start of the semester should have been an indication of how the class was gonna go. Anyways, onto grading. We were literally never told what the grading guidelines were and what the graders were looking for. Anytime we got our grade back, my group always lost points on arbitrary things or things we were never told we had to include. It would've been helpful to see the rubric used for grading before hand so we could make sure we knew what we were doing. In terms of final grade, he added a 7% bonus if you completed course evals and one other extra credit assignment so that was the only positive and the only reason I got an A in this waste of time of a class. The structure of this course needs a ton of work (honestly just bring back floryan). There's a lot more I could say but I'm gonna stop here as the other reviews mostly cover it.

Apostolellis was one of the worst CS professors I have ever had, and I am a 4th year in my last semester of college. He puts on a facade of being self-reflective and accepting of feedback (asks for it constantly), but is rude and defensive when you suggest anything. Students pointed out sexist remarks he made during lecture on Piazza, and he denied them and spent the next 20 minutes of the next lecture defending himself, spouting reasons why he thought the remarks were not sexist. He also made a Holocaust joke once (I think he called the things they did to Jews "beautiful experiments"). Ironic because HCI is supposed to be an empathic process, too bad it's taught by a professor who makes sexist remarks and horrific comments about the Holocaust and thinks it's okay. His assignments are full of busy work and have really harsh grading and are full of unclear expectations. Our group consistently got Cs, despite going to office hours for almost every assignment and having the TAs tell us they were okay. His book is full of HCI terms that all sound exactly the same, even though they are supposed to describe different things. Not an easy A class at all, please bring Floryan back to teach it!!!

Stay as far away from this class as you possibly can. Professor Apostollellis is highly condescending, rude and presumptuous. His teaching style (which he loves to brag about) consists of doing useless busy work littered with buzz words about UX/UI while also teaching absolutely nothing. He and the TAs make this class so much harder and more complicated than it needs to be while failing to make grading guidelines clear. You won't learn anything from this class so don't waste your time. Simultaneously the worst and most boring class I've taken at UVa. Choose a different elective.

Started off easy, but he changed the policies and grading midway through the semester. Content isn't difficult whatsoever, but grading guidelines were super unclear and unfair. Lectures were painfully boring and I learned absolutely nothing of use, and attendance is required. Don't take this class, as long as Apostolellis is teaching this

He is condescending, rude, and mean. Completely disorganized and not an effective lecturer in the least. I can honestly say I've learned nothing from this class. Stay away.

Rubrics are incredibly vague and does not give out the final rubric for any parts of our project until he released the grades for it. Lost points for things he did not tell us he wanted. Not willing to give back points. Project and In-class activities are useless. Did not learn anything from this class. Absolutely no coding, so I can't really talk about this project done in interviews.

I initially wrote a really nice review for this class because my group was doing fairly well by doing little to no work, but that caught up to us quickly and now I despise this class. It's boring, it's confusing, and overall completely useless in the large scheme of computer science. This class sucks, the professor sucks, the TAs suck, everything sucks.

worst class ever. do not take. you do not learn anything. The projects are just hours of busy work, yet somehow apostolellis finds a way to give you a terrible grade. Take literally any other elective!