Ratings and Reviews for Introduction to Data Science in Python

I love this kind of courses wehn the lectures are clear, short and meaningfull with real topics and hands on the topic, really good course

This course helps me a lot! Thanks for all staffs. Hope the grader system coud give more specific feedback.

Assignments are challenging, but some questions are very vague and require lots of trial and error guesswork to get the autograder to accept them.

The course gives practice in Python, but programming assignments were loaded with "busy work" that added little value and often had only loose ties to the material discussed in class. While this forces more independent learning, it also makes it so that this course isn't really much better than free online tutorials. I found myself learning almost everything for the programming assignments from the pandas package documentation and from Google searches that led to stackoverflow. For an instructor from the University of Michigan whose bio says "I work with colleagues to design tools to better the teaching and learning experience in higher education," I was expecting a lot more value for the time spent in this class. I suspect that this course is being used to provide data for furthering his own research. It's often more difficult to maximize value to customers when personal incentives may not be perfectly aligned with customer (student) objectives.

I was quite disappointed by the almost total inaccessibility of the staff in the discussion forums, the unconquerability of the autograder for most of the assignments (losing points for no discernible reason, with all resources exhausted), the lack of a stats module for the specialization, and the lack of education, really. There is value in asking students to learn on their own, but this course goes much too far with that, giving problem sets that are virtually unsolvable without prior experience in data wrangling in R or some other data language. This leaves serious, hardworking students with little choice but to troll the forums for solutions. Hardly the best way to learn the intricacies of this subject.

great hands on course, with challenging exercises and fast paced lectures. the homework assignments need some rephrasing, as it is not always clear whats being asked. looking forward to the second course in this specialization

Overall I thought the level of the course was good. The programming assignments were complex and long enough that you had a good opportunity to re-inforce topics covered in the course. I already had a good bit of pandas experience so the course was helpful to re-inforce things I was already familiar with but hadn't been forced to try out. I think if you don't already have pandas experience the assignments might be tough.

High quality content and challenging assignments. Really good!

This course is accurately advertised as requiring intermediate programming experience. It focusses on some of the basic python tools that are used in data science like pandas, specifically dataframes. For a python newbie like me, some of the assignments were quite challenging as they required significant additional reading and search. I would have appreciated if all of the concepts required to solve the assignments were introduced in the same week, so my additional reading and search would have been more targeted. Very little stats if any is required or taught.

I thought the videos for this course were appropriately concise and well-done. The projects were about the right difficulty and length (although the one for week three was more time consuming than expected). They were interesting enough to keep engaged. I think the span of topics was also useful and appropriate. I would have liked if the autograder gave more detailed output on what was wrong with a submission. I also think it would be extremely beneficial to see the "right" ways of solving this problems after a submission is completed. I'm sure I didn't use the optimal pandas approach in some instances, as it stands I seem to have no way of knowing and improving my knowledge beyond getting a passing grade.