Ratings and Reviews for Introduction to Data Science in Python

A great introduction. But assignment grading a little bit tricky.

This class is an absolutely horrible experience for those of us new to programming and data science. For a few of the assignments, you are asked to return a dataset based on the merging of multiple data sets. A better approach would have been to have a checkpoint at each step to ensure the resulting data frame met the requirements. For example, if the data set needed to be ordered in a certain way with the header formatted a certain way, then let's have a separate checkpoint for the order of the values and yet a different checkpoint for the header values. The staff needs to understand that having the correct answer at each step of the process is not a bad way to help the student know if his/her code is correct. After all, the staff can easily modify the dataset read in by the student's code after submission to ensure that the student did not use any hardcoded values. Despite the frustration with the Coursera platform, I can honestly say this is the most fun subject I've had in a long time. But the format selected is absolutely horrific and not conducive to learning and understanding the material.

Very useful training

The value in this course comes primarily from the assignments but the instructions tied to these assignments fell a bit short. It would be immensely helpful to have a short FAQ explaining how to set up your environment (i.e. which packages and versions to use) along with test files to verify assignment outputs. Digging through the discussion forum is sufficient but the ambiguity does lead to unnecessary frustration.

This is a pretty awful course, as of the time of writing this review in July of 2019. Let me preface this by saying that the material you learn is very helpful. Pandas is a great library to learn for loading, cleaning, and manipulating large amounts of data. But the real problem with this course isn't the material, it's the lectures and the autograder. The lectures are very short. They don't cover the concepts well enough, and some material is blatantly skipped and you have to learn it yourself through google. Then comes the video quizzes which test you on functions and concepts that haven't even been introduced yet. It's like the quizzes were put at timestamps randomly. Then comes the worst part of the course: the Autograder. I'm not sure how old this course is but the autograder is running on an outdated version of both python and pandas. What does this mean for you? Well if you want to code on your computer instead of the course's broken online coding notebook, you will run into severe code-breaking bugs between versions. It really ruins the course. I learn the material but then spend hours trying to please the broken autograder. Most of the time in this course isn't spent learning, it's spent fixing code that the autograder rejects even though it runs perfectly on your machine locally. Have fun!

Really great course. Looking for more like it. Love both astronomy and software, this had both!

Amazing Course Thanks a lot!

The course material provided is absolutely great and sufficient for better understanding.

Excellent course for a beginner like me !!!

The course is good if you are carrying even a little experience with python and data science. The teaching methodology is not that impressive but it can make key points clear. Assignments are really good which can be the best part of the course undoubtedly. Though once enrolled, you will yourself going through the discussion forums a lot because not everything is provided for the assignments. Self-exploring is highly encouraged.