This class is worth taking! I'll start off by saying that it is a very easy A. There are 3 grades for the entire semester. A midterm and final (with identical formats) and a large final paper. After going to the midterm, it was obvious that half the class has never been to a lecture before. And you really don't need to. Prof. Beatley gives you a list of terms to study before the midterm and final, as long as you go through all the ones marked in red (which should take a max of 3 hours), you will get an A on the exam. The TAs and even Prof. Beatley grade very easily. The final paper is long and in it you are tasked at analyzing your home town. If your home town has a lot of information on it's planning history, this will be a very easy paper to write. However, that is not the case for everyone. I wish I didn't put off this paper until finals week because it did take a long time to write, even if it was relatively easy. There are quite a few readings, however I don't know anyone who actually did them.

With that being said, the content of this course is extremely interesting! I would love just finding a comfortable spot in class, working on homework for other classes while listening to Prof. Beatley lecture. It often felt like I was watching a YouTube video. If you need an easy A to fill your schedule, this is it!

This has to be the easiest class at this university. I feel really bad for Professor Beatley, as he is incredibly passionate and knowledgable about planning as a whole, but was unable to use that passion to deliver captivating lectures. The lectures and readings are basically optional. I showed up simply to have a venue to do my homework in. If you need an easy 3 credits, take this course. If you want to learn about planning, take one of Moomaw's or Mondschein's classes instead.

I cannot recommend this class enough. It can be whatever you want or need out of class. Attendance is optional, if you want an easy class with minimal time needed to study for the midterm and final. The final paper is 10-15 pages but is not difficult and you tend to learn something interesting about the urban planning in your county. If you do go to class Professor Beatley is an amazing person and loves urban planning. He tends to get excited about one project or another and spend all of class with it, which can be great to learn about to or provide a calming place to do homework. If you do not go to class you still learn about interesting projects on that one day you actually study for the midterm or final that give you something to talk about during environmental conversations at Thanksgiving.

Not as easy of an A as I was thought it would be. Attendance in lectures isn't necessary but I still attended almost all of the lectures and studied hard and still ended with an A-. Unlike pervious years where students where allowed to take the exams anywhere they wanted we had to take the exams in the lecture hall. Beatley is very passionate and knowledgeable but his lecture are very boring and hard to pay attention to. If you don't have to take this class I would not.

HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO DO TO GET A 95+ IN THIS COURSE:

- attend lectures (even though 70% of students don’t)
- define the key terms (listed at the end of each slideshow)
- start the paper worth 40% of the grade atleast a week in advance

That’s it. I got a 95% in this course without opening a single reading. It’s an easy A if you’re willing to attend the lectures.

Professor Beatley clearly loves urban planning. He also loves his slideshows. Ever single 75 minute lecture followed the same structure: Beatley opens slideshows, Beatley wastes time on a slide through an unrelated tangent that won’t be tested, Beatley realizes he’s wasted too much time, Beatley proclaims “oop! I’m fast running out of time here!”, Beatley fails to complete the slides.

I think throughout the entire semester, he got through the slides three times. Each time he did the room erupted into (sarcastic) applause. It was that rare.

Despite PLAN 1010s mind-numbing lectures, it is necessary to attend them. The two exams are both based entirely on regurgitating slideshow terms that Beatley discusses in lecture. Students who don’t attend lecture will attempt to get full definitions off the uploaded slides on Collab, but most terms won’t have additional text, and are only defined in lecture.

The final (and only) paper isn’t difficult to write, just time consuming. Beatley asks students to write about the urban planning issues, strategies, and futures of their home towns. If you start it atleast a week before the due date and have over 10 pages, you should get an A.

P.S. - Beatley offers an extra credit opportunity where he gives a guided tour of The Charlottesville Downtown Mall. Do it! It’s fun.

This class is not beneficial and it is incredibly boring. Professor Beatley is a big deal in the planning world and is very passionate about the subject, but he does not know how to lecture. Instead of picking 1-3 planning initiatives to talk about in depth per lecture, he glosses over about 20 or so. Because of this, I felt like I did not learn anything new about planning this semester. I just have long lists of very vague terms which is annoying since I am considering majoring in planning. Professor Beatley will post a study guise 1-2 weeks before the midterm and final with a list of the terms you should know. Warning, there will be over 100. He should highlight the ones are "important." Only focus on these; it brings the total closer to just 100. Overall the exams are not too hard, but they are graded kind of harshly. There is also a final paper that I recommend starting early on because it has to be 10-15 pages. You definitely do not have to do the readings, but I would recommend watching the videos and skimming articles when studying for the exams. While this is an easy class, I would not exactly recommend the class because you do have to put in some work for an A and you do not gain much from the class.

This was an easy class in the fact that you barely have to do any work, but hard to get a good grade. There is a midterm and a final, as well as one paper. Yes those are all the assignment for the class, but that means that you have to do extremely well on everything to get an A. I found that the tests were graded fairly difficult and others agreed with me. You have to really know the terms in depth to do well although you don't need to know all of them. Also, some of the online study guides can be misleading so make your own if you can. Lectures are VERY boring, the majority of the class only showed up on test days. He just isn't great at keeping everyone engaged. Overall probably not a class I would take again, but it was required for my major. Take it if you want an easy class not a GPA boost.

This course was very detailed. Prof Beatley is nice and approachable. He knows a lot about his field. Sometimes the lectures were long-winded, but imo you don't need to attend every class to be successful in this course. There are only 3 assignments — As long as you study the terms for the midterm and final, and work hard on the final paper, you should be fine.

This class is certainly one of the easier I've taken at UVA, but the subject matter is pretty interesting. Professor Beatley is a good guy and definitely has a ton of passion for the subject (especially the environmental side of things), but the lectures can definitely get a little dry and boring. It's sometimes hard to tell what he wants students to take out of the lectures vs what are just tangents that interest him.
The class has a midterm and final (which consist of a couple of term ID's plus an essay), plus an end-of-semester Community Planning Analysis (which is a 10-15 page paper analyzing planning in your own city). It's not difficult to get an A in the class if you don't attend all the lectures (he records them all as well), as long as you review the terms before the exams. All of the readings in the syllabus were supplemental, and there were no required books to purchase for the class.

*during COVID, so completely online [#tCF2020]
Great guy, not so content heavy on the lectures though. I am going to go into the civil/environmental engineering field and thought I would learn a lot from this class but that was not exactly the case. I learned more about specific examples of things rather than new systems/new information about the environmental planning field. Other reviews talk more on this as the exams really are just remembering those specific examples and then writing about them. This is an extremely easy class. I didn't do the readings at all, wrote the paper in 2 days, and just studied the Quizlet of terms before the exams and I got an A. I watched all the lectures though on 2.5x speed and it actually did help me when memorizing the terms for the exam as the visualization of what was talked/having a picture attached to the term jogged my memory on what Prof Beatley said about it so I recommend doing that for the specific examples you study for each topic.