Impossible exams, the median grade on the final for my entire class was 60% with every single person taking it (so no outlier 0's), and lows below 40. And that's an OPEN BOOK final with a note page allowed. This shows how the book for the class had almost nothing to do with the extent of the minutia you were being tested on. No amount of studying matters because it feels like you might as well be studying a different topic, or you're studying the 'for dummies' copy and being tested on the appendices of the expert edition. The exams feel like you're playing CPA Jeopardy. You're often expected to know the exact numbers for exact years (that will change next year and every year after..) instead of knowing the actual fundamentals and occasionally, the answer is cued to a different year the que...read more

The only learning tool provided for this class was a connect textbook. You will learn the most by doing the major project for this course and you will have to teach it all to yourself by googling and reading the IRS instructions for the forms. Occasionally there are very interesting and informative things you will read in the textbook and I wish the assignments had shifted our focus more on these facts than the numbers for 2023. I shouldn't be able to tell you the amount of the 2023 dependent income exemption that will change next year (a question on the final) and not which tax forms are for what purpose (0 questions on the final). Something only occasionally casually mentioned in the textbook, not a single mod was dedicated to, and you will only encounter when you have a project where yo...read more

While the Prof seemed nice and encouraging, she gave zero lectures or examples that are desperately needed in this topic. No teaching occurred in this class, just grading and most of that was done electronically by Connect or Canvas. I appreciate that she gave enough assignments that our GPA was not entirely nosedived by the exams.

Early on for some homework assignments if I didn't know the answer I wouldn't drive myself crazy trying to figure it out. You will need EVERY fraction of a point you can muster from the assignments and projects. If you do all of the work, do it as well as you possibly can, and do not submit anything late you can still pass the class while failing the exams. Study hard for the first two exams because they are connected to the textbook enough that studying helps. Because of the plethora of assignments, the open book for quizzes/exams, and the check my work 1X feature allowed for quizzes and unlimited for assignments, it is actually not hard to pass this class but it is hard to learn anything about taxation from this class. Because of all of these features being enabled, I thought this woul...read more