Professor Davis is engaging and clear in his lectures and the material gets pretty interesting. The class is pretty "mathy" at times but it doesn't go beyond plugging and chugging numbers into formulas you have to memorize. Exams are fair as long as you cram and memorize the slides the day or two before, and the constellation lab is a meme. The homeworks were definitely the most frustrating, but even those were relatively easy. The questions were pretty tricky and made you double guess yourself at time and since there's rarely any partial credit and not a lot of questions total, 1 or 2 questions wrong could take a take a toll on your average. The study guides before exams are also pretty helpful and pretty much cover everything that's going to be on the exams. The practice problems on those study guides are usually pretty indicative of what types of concepts will be tested on the exam, so know the concepts inside and out. If anything's confusing, go to his office hours and he'll give you help. Not the most exciting lectures to attend, but you have to go to answer the learning catalytics questions. You have a buffer for these too so you can get quite a few wrong and still get full credit. Overall, good class with interesting material - would recommend.

This class was not only the best and most interesting class I've taken at uva, but also one of the easiest. Shane Davis is an excellent professor, who has an extremely strong understanding of the class material, and who seems to really wants to help his students succeed. There are short multiple choice homework assignments and blog posts each week, which take a combined hour tops, and intermittent short readings (there is no textbook). There are also in-class questions through learning catalytics, which make up about 15% of your grade, and are basically free points because you only need to get about half of the questions right to get full credit. There are 3 tests and a final, and for each one, Professor Davis will give you a review sheet that contains all that you need to know, as well as giving you near-exact replicas of the short free response question that is on each exam. In this class, you will learn about special and general relativity, the origins of the universe, how black holes are made, supernovas, where the atoms in your body came from, what would happen if one were to get too close to a black hole, and more. I would recommend this class to anyone with any interest in astronomy or the universe, to anyone with a free class slot, or anyone who is trying to find an interesting, easy class to fulfill their science requirement. If you take this class, I challenge you to try to come up with a question that Professor Davis doesn't have an answer to, because my friends and I could not.