Mid professor, easy course. Lectures are boring and my TA wasn't very helpful either which was frustrating. I wouldn't recommend this class to anyone that doesn't have to take it. #tCFS25

The class has so much potential - it teaches regression analysis which is crucial to statistics - but ultimately fails. You literally just copy from her RPubs guide for the classwork and open note exams (called labs) but just change a few things, you don't even need to understand the code. There's a project but my group finished in a few hours the day it was due for both parts. Lectures are not required and not useful at all. I attended like two lectures and would do the classworks right before they were due in a few hours. Professor V is nice but the class is a waste of time, I didn't take anything away. It's an easy A class though.

I am coming back and writing this review after two semesters because I realize how important this class is and how I lacked fundamentals. Regression is necessary for a lot of upper-level classes and possibly in the industry, and this class does not provide a solid foundation. This is likely because of the way the course is structured. I mean I think this class is an easy A but it doesn't reinforce the material and it is just assignments. Learning was shallow and surface-level. I ABSOLUTELY HATE that a flipped classroom was used for this because that is not how you learn a foundational class. Professor V is definitely organized, but she does not go above and beyond to teach concepts. I don't know man. I feel like the job of a professor is to answer questions and encourage curiosity. I don't think Professor V gave us many opportunities for that, maybe the project ig. The statistics department at UVA is not the best, so for your own sake please solidify your foundations with external courses because this class will not get the job done :(

Unless this class is required, do not take this class. Krista is a terrible professor and doesn't really care for her students or her job in general. This class is supposed to be a "flipped classroom". However, you do not really retain the information you learn from the instruction you do out of class. The videos she posts are not that helpful as she just reads off the slides for 20-30 minutes. In class, we work on our classwork that is usually due once every 2-3 weeks. Krista is extremely lazy when it comes to responding to emails or getting things graded on time. I had an issue with submitting one assignment due to knitting problems and it took 3 email attempts and 2 in-person visits for her to properly acknowledge the issue. She put in grades on Canvas during Thanksgiving break, which is a little too late to have an understanding of how well you're doing in class. The final project is interesting as you work in groups of 3-4 where you research a topic of your own and apply everything we have learned to the project. Another plus to taking this class is that attendance isn't mandatory. Overall, I do not recommend taking this class unless it is a requirement.

To do well in this course has to do more with ability to copy and paste, not organically producing outputs, understanding different functions, and general coding acumen. There is so much emphasis placed on all of the wrong things; getting the correct output is higher on the order of importance than understanding the output and its meaning/implications. I learned a decent amount in the class, but somehow it all felt unimportant/superfluous. I wish Krista cared slightly more about how she presents herself and comes off to students. She legitimately wears pajamas somedays, and will NEVER turn down an opportunity to complain to the class about students emailing her about grades.

This class utilizes the flipped-classroom structure where you are supposed to watch videos before coming to class. Once you come to class, you are supposed to ask questions and work through the classwork. Put simply, in a class of eighty kids, this just isn't effective, and this is DEMONSTRABLY true when you consider the results of the weekly in-class check ins. 1 to 5 on how confident students are with the material, 1 being not confident at all, 5 being super confident, and the average among a sample of ~150 students is usually around a 2, but for one reason or another, this never seems to concern Krista.

The final project is the best part of the class; it's interesting and you get free rein to do as you see fit with your data/research questions. Just follow the rubric incredibly closely, and you will probably do well, so long as you do not have any glaring mistakes elsewhere. Your final presentation is reviewed by a stat professor or a TA alongside other groups of students, and your score is an aggregation of what they think of you. For your sake, hope you don't get Ross; that guy is so disparaging and mean to presenters. He's very unhappy and incredibly impolite: yawning during people presenting, belittling them and their efforts, asking disingenuous questions, and berating their data, research methods, variable transformations, etc. He needs to find a new job.

All in all, the course has potential, but it kind of just stinks. You learn some stuff, but none of it feels that important. Getting the right outputs and making it look pretty is prioritized over understanding the outputs and what they mean for your data, which is evident by the copy-and-paste-from-the-notes-but-change-it-slightly-to-fit-the-variables nature of the exams (labs). The labs don't encourage critical thinking, coding acumen, or statistical understanding as much as they encourage rote dictation. The no late work policy is slightly annoying, only because sometimes there are issues with knitting/formatting and downloading to her EXACT specifications, but I am sure that is not going to change. All that said, it's easy to do well (B+ or better pretty easily) because she drops the lowest of every grade category.

Required for Stat major and minor (wouldn't recommend it otherwise). Understanding of statistics from AP or other intro classes is helpful, and taking STAT 1601 is good to cover R. Lots of people were worried about the coding, but all we really did was copy and paste her code then make edits for our own work. No one would be able to code anything on their own because we never even learned the functions or arguments.

Highly recommend actually attending class and watching the videos or you won't learn anything. Each week she would do a survey of how well the class understood the topic and was so unfazed by it being extremely low every time.

Final project was interesting and ultimately helped my learning but the instructions were super unclear. Required lots of reading between the lines and going to office house when it could have just been made plain in the instructions.

Krista can be tough! She goes through all the stats theory properly and equips you well for anything graded. With that said, she can be tough and stern with expectations of the class, so make sure to follow up to her standard and you'll be fine.

#tCFF23
This class is pretty easy. Like some other STAT classes, Prof. Varanyak drops the lowest grade in almost every category so you can take the L quite a few times and still end up with an A. There's a "lab" for every unit, that's more like an extended version of the classroom and just tests your ability to actually replicate the stuff she goes over in class. The material is really useful, if a bit dry, and the lectures aren't the most engaging... but honestly Krista is doing her best with what she has. Linear regression just be like that. No exams, just a big project that's due in two chunks plus a presentation with your poster, oh and it's a group project btw. She grades very nicely, though the TAs do vary a bit in their niceness. Pretty lowkey class all in all.

EASY CLASS TO GET AN A
BUT HOLD ON FOR THE RIDE OF A TERRIBLE PROFESSOR, ESPECIALLY IF YOU NEED TO REACH HER!!!

-----> Read below to see how bad she is:
I am currently a fourth year and in all of my semesters at UVA, I have never had a worse professor than Krista. One the first day of classes she urged us not to email her as she would not be checking her emails and instead ask the TAs or ask our classmates via Piazza. I assume that the thousands of dollars spent on my education are not enough for her to even care about my questions. If that were not unprofessional enough, she wears sweatshirts and leggings to class. To make matters worse, I emailed her about a personal matter that required further attention and not a matter for the TAs or Piazza. After about a week, my Dean got involved, we finally met via Zoom and remedied the situation. However, once my situation worsened and I emailed her about it, she did not respond for a week. I then followed up and waited another 3 days before a response. Her response asked about setting up a meeting where she asked for my availability that week... despite responding within two hours on that Monday, I did not get a response until the following Tuesday. This response was a meeting later in the week that she ended up 'ghosting' me at and never showing up for our zoom call. Eventually, we met in person, where I had to defend myself for needing more time for a family member passing away rather than her compassion and understanding during these troubling times.

Inside of the classroom, she is genuinely a questionable professor at best. Having taken an engineering mathematics course prior using R and in statistics, I thankfully had a handful of background knowledge on the topic. However, she fails to discuss the meaning of the p-values, alpha thresholds, and all of the other values we get from our code. Instead, she finds it rather of extreme importance that we are able to "Knit" our documents into a pdf so it is aesthetically pleasing. This shows absolutely no knowledge of the content and rather harps on can you copy, paste, and edit code correctly from Classwork to Homework. In class, we sit in groups and strictly conduct groupwork as if we are in high school. Lecture teaches absolutely nothing other than talking to the groupmates around you and maybe her taking attendance that day.

I do not believe she is fit to be a professor at this prestigious university at all. She would however make a wonderful subpar high school teacher in a district desperate for faculty members that have a PhD in Education and not the actual topic of Statistics.

Honestly, Professor V isn't that bad of a professor. She isn't exceptional, but can explain the content decently well.
I mostly self-learned the content from her slides and occasionally looked at the textbook.
make sure you know how to use R in this class, either by learning some R beforehand (or in a previous class) or asking help from the TAs. R is heavily used for most things in this class.
There are no exams, only 4 in person labs (basically similar to the classworks) which involve R. Regression analysis is quite interesting, and isn't too difficult if you've encountered it before (linear regression, MLR, logistic, ANOVA). There are also nearly weekly quizzes which are hit or miss in difficulty, some easy, some worded confusingly. Then there's a semester-long group project which is pretty fun and worth a solid amount of your grade.
It isn't too hard to get an A-/A, although at the beginning of the semester, an A = 95 (which was reduced to a 94).