APMA 3100

Hellings does a good job of teaching the class, but the grading for this class is the worst grading I have ever seen in a college class. You have five categories of mastery, and the lowest grade you get in any of the five categories is the highest grade you can get in the class. You have learning targets where you have to get 100% on the question for that subject, and if you do not you get a fail for that unit target. I will say that you get two retakes after your first fail, but it is still difficult since you have to get 100% on that retake question. It seems easier since you get to retake for the ones you previously failed, but that is an extra question that you have to complete for the next test. Overall, the content is alright, but the exam formatting makes the class significantly more painful than it needs to be. The TAs are extremely helpful though, so that is really nice.

This course is a tough one but professor Hellings is by far the best Professor I've had in all of my APMA classes. I believe he is new to UVA but his teaching is very clear, he really cares about his students, and takes the time to explain things in an excellent manner to you. If you are taking Probability, I highly highly recommend him!

Based on my friends in other classes Hellings was definitely the best professor for prob. I took the class when it was online so the structure is probably different now. Before class we would have to watch recorded lectures by one of the other prob professors, but Hellings would go through some helpful practice problems at the start of class that made the content make a lot more sense. Then we would be put into groups and have to work on an in-class worksheet that Hellings made. The questions were sometimes tricky but Hellings would do a great job explaining them either during class if you ask or during office hours. Also highly recommend his office hours, I think that's what helped me do so well in the class because he would go into some of the small details which ended up being on tests.

This course is definitely one of the harder/more time-consuming APMA courses. With that being said, Hellings is a very sweet, nice, and approachable professor. He's organized, teaches well, and always extended our project deadlines to include the weekends to give us a few more days to complete things. If you gotta take this class, I highly recommend Hellings. #tCFspring2021

First all Probability is a horrible class regardless of who you take it with. The material is confusing, long, and it's extremely easy to fall behind even if you do all the worksheets and readings. The class consisted of worksheets, projects, WebWork, exams, and a final.

The worksheets were only about 2-3 pages and followed pretty closely to lecture and were generally pretty doable. Since this was an online semester 90% of the time my groupmates said absolutely nothing to me.

Projects were coding-based and were doable for anyone with coding experience in under a few hours.

Webwork like all APMA classes was hard and useless.

Exams were hard af but that's just expected and the final was just a longer exam but it focused on the new material.

Christian himself is a super cool dude who is chill as long as you talk to him. Some days he gave us break days which was nice of him and also he let me work with another student outside the section. The best quality about him is his lecture slides. He doesn't read off the same presentation from 2011 but he makes his own notes and creates his own problems to work off of. Also, he did a bunch of live demonstrations about Probability in Excel which was super cool of him.

The only thing he didn't do well was grading assignments on time. I didn't get my first project grade till the end of the semester and I'm pretty sure I turned it in the first month of the semester.

Outside of his sometimes slow grading, once again very nice person I would recommend him or Hui ma.

I cried more over this class than any other one during my time at UVA and it surprisingly ended up great. By great I mean I worked hard enough to get an A+, expected a D- and ended up with a B

Hellings as a professor is very gentle and sweet. He passed some extremely helpful, personal cheat sheets for the exams. He also kept the collab site very organized in terms of weeks, exam resources etc. For the 15% projects he was God Sent 🙏, because he basically uploaded walk through videos for major sections.

This online semester they released prerecorded videos for each week over weekend and you are expected to watch the 1-2 hr lecture and finish suggested book problems before starting the week. Every class, professor goes over the key topics in more depth and then everyone does a worksheet.

For the love of God, DO NOT SKIP THE PRERECORDED LECTURE and Book Questions BEFORE the week starts.

I watched them after class and it made life so much harder for me because I couldn't utilize the class time that well, since I didn't know the topics beforehand.

This class overall is very dull yet hard and you will have to really rely on keeping up with the pace. It is very lucrative to skip zoom meetings but again, you will make your life miserable come exam times.

Since exams are open notes, they made ridiculously hard to decipher exams to prevent cheating. Learn early in the semester how to translate between English and Probability, in terms of Random Variables and you life will get easier. Averages were around 80-50. For exam 3, average was so bad they literally replaced our scores with a section from final.

Obviously doable though. Good luck. You can take it with whomever you want, you will be doing most of the work by yourself. I liked Hellings tho