Professor Hoopes is generally okay at describing the content but her lectures just go over our reading. I found most of the content in the course somewhat random and irrelevant. There is quite a bit of work and as someone already mentioned, most of it is just busy work and time-consuming. I can't say that I have learned much in this course, to be honest, and the exams are tested upon things that we barely went over in class. It's a shame that this is a mandatory class for commerce.

Hoopes is a really nice professor. The class is easy, just study the notes and her presentations. Some of the information might seem meaningless or repetitive, but the class is still easy. The only part of the class that is unfair are the group projects; if your group is bad that it would reflect poorly on your grade. Everyone is saying the class is dumb and not fair. In reality, if you treat the class like a game of memorization and following the patterns that you notice from her grading style, you will get an A.

This course was quite the opposite of introduction. The material was not that bad but the way it was taught was. Prof. Hoopes is definitely knowledgeable but didn't seem like she wanted to be teaching and gave an insane amount of work without a care. She was not very personal, helpful, or engaging. It seemed like a waste of time to go to class since she posted the slides and never added anything more, but attendance is a graded. Her tests are incredibly unfair for the level of material. It should not have been anything crazy hard but she picks the most detailed, irrelevant piece of material that she might've mentioned once and puts it all over the exam. The exams are "multiple choice" but its not all that much better when there 7 answer choices. It was ridiculous, my studying really did not help as much as it should've. She also gives very little feedback so you never really know why you got any grade. Your grade is all based on a bunch of tedious busy work that you just have to do thoroughly. The assignments take a bit to do but its such a big factor. Overall I did not like the way she went about teaching this class and hope to have a better experience in the future. Its sad because it could have been a really fun class considering that assignments were interesting and the material wasn't too heavy, but she really butchered it.

In short, Hoopes is nice but her course was pretty dumb.

Here’s what you need for an A:
- attend lectures and take notes (attendance graded)
- do the readings (exams based on regurgitating info from the readings)
- BS a ton of writing and slog through busywork assignments

To begin, Hoopes clearly cares about the course, the material, and the students. She’s passionate about the material, incorporating daily business news that’s relevant to the topic, and lecturing in a manner that was engaging most of the time.

However, work/exams outside of lectures were bloated, annoying, and felt like a waste of time. The exams were all 40 MC questions, and as long as you take notes and do the readings you should be able to get a 90+ on all of them. The questions can get pretty annoying and ticky-tacky, asking for EXACT definitions (Is it “A. Customer Supporting or B. Customer Support”? Seriously???). Still, I finished each exam within 20 minutes.

Besides exams and attendance, two other types of assignments make up the bulk of your grade: the Company Portfolio and Group Projects. These are time-consuming and feel like assignments you get in a 10th grade history class when your teacher needs to fill the gradebook with random stuff. The Portfolio Project required 8 essays, about one a week, in which you selected a public company and wrote about aspects that were loosely tied to material in the course. They boiled down to “Jem Rian is the CEO of Chipotle. His leadership style is super good because he loves delicious Mexican food and makes sure all his employees cook delicious Mexican food with delicious Mexican ingredients”. Filler words to fill a word count for a filler assignment. Doing the bare minimum was enough for low 90s. The group projects are a similar story.

Overall, an easy A if your willing to waste your time.

Material is really easy, but everything else makes the class a joke. The exam question are out of pocket and shouldn't even be considered as questions. If you weren't in the class, you would barely know it was about "commerce." It's pretty much impossible to be completely prepared for the exams since there's a lot of irrelevant questions. Really wish I didn't have to take this course. Lots of work that is waste of your time instead of really learning about business.

Honestly, people are being too harsh on Prof. Hoopes. Everything in this course (barring the simulations) is effort-based. The grade you receive on written assignments depends on the effort that you made drawing on concepts covered in the modules. The tests are multiple-choice and Hoopes gives a review sheet beforehand. To prepare for this, one can make quizlets and draw information from the readings. This class is pure memorization (but don't cram). Even though some test questions may draw on lectures, people generally do okay on them. As for the material, I felt that many concepts were shallow, and this course would be better if fewer topics were taught with more depth.

One of the gripes I had with this class is that people had to grade each other's portfolios. 5% of your grade hinged on the mercy of the people who grade you. It just irritates me to see my grade lowered because some people decided to grade harshly on your rough drafts. Also, the grade received on the bike simulation depended on the quality of your group, which (even though I had a good group) did not seem fair. Plus, her 3rd module exam was a dumpster fire. But, there are so many components to your grade, and it's nice to see that one bad grade won't destroy your grade. While there are a lot of issues in the course, it is still very bearable, and will only get better as Hoopes teaches more. It's very possible to get a good grade, and it depends on how much effort you put into the class. This class isn't the best that I took at UVA, but it certainly doesn't deserve 1 and 2-star ratings.

It's clear that Professor Hoopes knows a lot about the business, finance, accounting, commerce space, but the way this class it taught is absolutely awful and I learned nothing commerce or business related from the class. The lectures were dry, boring, and added nothing to my learning. All it did was restate the same things from our assigned readings, which were also tedious and non beneficial to most things business related. 90% of the work was just busy work and very tedious with no beneficial learning. Her grading also changed midway through the course, and she began taking off random points for no reason with no explanation "just because" There was often no rubric or guidelines to many of the assignments we did and there was little to no communication or feedback throughout the entire course. Why was a bike video game where she gave no guidance, rubric, or instructions worth so much of our grade, when it seems like nobody (even the teams who did well) completely knew what they were doing. Everyone seemed like they employed the same strategies, and it's like 10% of my grade was based on luck, and an AI generated score. She couldn't even give an explanation for what was happening. Also terrible communication and never answered questions on Piazza. She also made the course inactive so she wouldn't have to answer people asking genuine questions about the course and the grading. The course material was so easy, but the exams were unnecessarily difficult with random and obscure details being questions. I know this was her first semester teaching the course, but this was honestly such a dysfunctional course and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, unless you have to since it's a COMM school pre-req.

I think that was the hardest class I've taken and it did not need to be. Furthermore, Charlotte Hoopes was not at all accommodating for health emergencies or other issues. This is an Intro to Commerce course and honestly both accountings were a ton easier than this. I hope UVA chooses to hold their professors to a higher standard in the future and I hope this class doesn't completely ruin my chances of getting into Mcintire.

First off, I would like to say that Professor Hoopes is one of the nicer humans at UVA. It is clear that she is very well educated and is knowledgeable about the subject at hand. However, this class was nothing short of disappointing. As someone with basic knowledge in finance, I found the material assigned irrelevant and in most cases inapplicable to any realistic real-world scenario. While there were certainly exceptions, it was the way it was taught that hurt the students the most. Readings and class discussions barely connected to each other, assignments were busy work (at best), and to top it off, the grading of the class was baffling. Our exams were multiple choice assessments on collab that tested our skill to regurgitate useless information from readings (even when she never mentioned it in class) or obscure questions about surveys and conversations that took place during our 300 person lecture discussions. I learned next to nothing and felt as though this was quite a waste of time during my tenure here at UVA. If I hadn't been so determined to apply to the COMM school because of past experiences, I would've dropped this class 100x over and spent my time reading articles that actually pushed my understanding of finance and commerce. My only question that remains is: with topics that can so easily be engaging and interesting to Comm and non-comm students alike, why is this class so unnecessarily difficult!?

Hoopes is a really nice person but her teaching style just did not work for me. Her lecture would just cover everything we'd just read for homework basically without adding much new insight to it, though it was interesting when she discussed current events in business. But overall I strongly disliked the content of this class and didn't think it was interesting.

It feels like we spent most of the class covering very basic concepts that were presented straightforwardly in class, but the exams were so hard. You have to memorize really tiny details about basically everything, down to the exact phrasing of stuff. However, Hoopes did give a study guide with all the concepts that were to be covered in the test, which was really appreciated. She did try to give us the tools we needed to succeed. I think if I had studied more I would have done better on the exams, but at the same time some of the questions were just ridiculous IMO. There's no curve on anything but the averages weren't super low so I get why.

Mostly the class just felt really disorganized. I think this is Hoope's first year here so we were basically her guinea pigs to test out what worked and what didn't. She would change the difficulty of the tests drastically if the class did well on the last one, give seemingly-arbitrary grades on writing assignments (and there were a lot!) without a rubric half the time, etc. Plus the bikes simulation seemed pretty unfair because we were competing against other people in our class and your grade was mainly determined from your performance (and of course there are going to be people who come in last place, given that it's a zero sum game...). I had a good group that really thought about each decision beforehand, stayed after class to work on it, etc which helped but if you get a bad group I think you'd be screwed.