Ratings and Reviews for Introduction to Data Science in Python

One of the most satisfying and challenging online courses I've ever taken. It's a densely-packed, fast-paced course and the assignments can be a bit challenging. For the assignments, we are provided datasets that are similar to the ones that we are likely to encounter in the real world. This course also teaches us to refer the official documentation and where to look for when we encounter problems.

Very demanding and tough course, but I learned a lot and it was never too difficult.

These course is very good for data science with python in future for job purpose in industry.

It was excellent course. I have learned tones of materials on Python and I'm very glad for it. Good Luck!

Truly horrible delivery of the material - even worse than Coursera's old Intro to Machine Learning course from Univ of Washington. This course will discourage nearly anyone from pursuing Data Science. And it's not even an intro to data science. It's a course on Pandas for dataset manipulation. (In fairness, cleaning up ingest data is like 95% of the work in data science, but the course doesn't even tease the student with some exciting machine learning examples of where this is all headed.) It's not delivered like you'd expect an intro course. It does an awful job of progressing the student through the Pandas toolset, building concepts incrementally. The whole topic of object types, methods, returned objects, and chaining gets barely a mention, but it's essential to the assignments. Examples are rapid-fire and sparse - very few techniques needed in the assignments can be found in the examples. The Week 2 quiz tests on techniques not introduced until Week 3, and the Week 3 and 4 assignments cite "individual study" which is academic-speak for "We didn't teach you about this - go Google it". Then, there are errata that the student needs to pick out of the discussion forums to pass the assignments because some key questions are vague. The errata are 1-2 years old and they can't be bothered to correct errors. The auto-grader could be the highlight of the course, but it provides limited feedback on wrong answers and no guidance toward the right answer; just "wrong". You're not allowed to post code or discuss answers in the forum - you have to go to StackOverflow to do that. (It'd be awesome if several of the exercises provided the student with the answer and challenged them to match it, but instead it's very sink-or-swim.) Even when your answer is right, the auto-grader throws errors and warnings for, say, returning a numpy.float64 (which you should) when the grader is expecting a Python float type. Or it's expecting a float64 for a counter value (!!) when you provide an int64 (which is correct). These behaviors should have been fixed long ago. It claimed to be a 15-hour course; I did it intensively and invested more than 30 hours before pulling the plug on the final project. That was claimed to be a 4-hour project, but experience with the rest of the course says it'd be more like another 12 hours - and that's for a guy who's not new to coding. Bottom-line: I paid for educational material and I don't feel like this course delivers. What it does deliver is Pandas exercises and an "OK" auto-grader; truthfully, most of what I learned was via Google searches while trying to do the assignments - effective, but very slow and very frustrating. The real disappointment is seeing that the issues I encountered have been well-known for 2 years in the discussion forums; the course could be a lot better by now if they cared to nurture it. Finally, a frustrating aside that's on Coursera, not the instructors... Coursera's online Jupyter notebook platform is really unstable and constantly drops connections even when you're actively editing and executing cells. (Including from 2 Fortune 100 companies - it's not the connection.) Once dropped, the notebook can't be re-connected, and has to be re-launched from the syllabus at the risk of losing your most recent edits. (But beware, if you run Jupyter offline for stability, this course also has defective input filenames that will cause grading to fail - read the discussion forums first.)

This course is excellent if you're looking to learn how to use Pandas inside Jupyter Notebooks. Assignments are autograded and feedback can be received immediately. Course is a few years old and discussion forums contain answers to common questions

This course helped me a lot. I personally think that this is the essentials of getting known how to properly use python. I highly reccomdend this course.

Perfect Course. I never thought you can learn that much by studying 6-7 hours a week. Almost it is zero to hero. Thanks University of Michigan

Assignments were not clearly documented, causing lot of time spent in understanding the requirements than implementing a solution.

Generally, very good selection of content. The explanations are insufficient for passing the assignments tho, which means that most of the course work is self-study from the web. The buggy auto-grader sometime made the submission of the assignments quite a pain as one has to find a way to change the code in a way that still produces the right answer but doesn't blow up the auto-grader.