Ratings and Reviews for Introduction to Data Science in Python

should be done after good knowledge of Python

T H e course offered great new stricks and code hacks that would reduce the number of codes dramatically and makes the code a lot cleaner and readable. We have been doing similar stuff the hard way. So it is very refreshing to know how easily it can be done particularly with Pandas.

The course lectures hardly covered what was asked in the assignment. For someone who has a full-time job scouting through discussion forums is extremely time consuming.

Very good course. I have learnt a lot.

It was good

The assignments are much more difficult than what is covered in the class. The teaching speed is too fast without enough PPT slides. The class coding demonstration is also too fast. The lecturer should either teach more in class or make the assignments easier. Assignment 3 and assignment 4 need a lot of independent studies of the functions in pandas library. If the assignments need a lot of independent studies, what is the meaning of the teaching in class?

With great tasks, lectures, there're terrible assignments, w/o explanation, multiple interpretations. Ttest task in Module 4, is really a hard task, w/o any explanation, could have moved it in a different course.

TLDR - poor design of class makes for a bad experience and wasted time. Longer - There is a disjunct between what is covered in the videos and what is tested in the assignments, and there are problems with the assignments (the autograder and the extremely dated pandas version supported) . The videos function as a partial reference guide, which is only very loosely what is tested in the assignments. If I didn't pay for the class, I would see value in the assignments themselves. Since I did pay for the class, I expect more value from the videos. For the 3rd and 4th weeks I proceeded more quickly by relying much more heavily on stack overflow and pandas documentation, to the point of sometimes ignoring the videos entirely. As-is the gaps between videos and assignments, on the one hand, and ongoing difficulty of knowing how to navigate the black box which is the autograder (using an outdated version of pandas) are shunted to the forums and other students, volunteers, and assistants. While the forum is helpful (always start there with the assignments, so you will waste less time on poorly designed / assessed questions!), it is poor pedagogy and a bad experience to offload bad course design onto it.

PRO: The lectures and content are good. CON: The version of pandas the grader uses is quote old, and is older than the version used in the assignment notebooks, meaning some code that runs ok when you test it crashes in the grader, *with no useful error message*. This caused a lot of hassle and wasted time for me, but hopefully they've fixed it for the new course.

Very informative course for Data Science