Lectures are not that good, and most of the assignments require the student to spend countless hours on forums. Overall a very inefficient way of learning. If you value your time, try another course.

The instructor seems like he's reading out points of a book. No proper explanation of tools used followed by assignments so hard compared to what being taught in classes

not bad... theres a big mistake in the regex video.

assignments don't really match the lectures.

Without Corey Schafer and Sentdex on youtube I would've quit.

It never felt like the material was covered in enough depth to give me confidence in the ability to do the assignments.

Starts off well, then escalates way too quickly. Assignment 4 is incredibly complex and has poor guidance notes.

The Assignments are made too careless, spend too much time just to understand what is required.

I really don't like the way of explaining the process

the worst course i have ever seen

The assignments were way more complicated than the examples used during the lectures.

Too difficult, poor connection between lectures and assignments

Insanely fast paced course.. Needs Improvement

Very fast paced and poorly taught.

This is in fact the worst course so far. Mainly because of auto grader. Here are my reasons.

Actually I did not complete the course at all. But I suddenly got a message saying that I have completed the course. I was working on the first problem of the 4th assignment. I did a provisional submission to see if my answer was right. Auto grader reported the grade for the 3rd assignment and said that I have passed the course. Any submission I did after that was not graded at all.

The assignments are not very clear. Looks like I had a older version of the questions while others had a different version. I was stuck in a particular problem because auto grader did not give me a clear feedback as to why I was incorrect. I wasted too much time on this already.

The assignments require too much research outside what is covered in the videos. I don't feel that is right. The assignment requires that we research on Stack Overflow and Pandas documentation. I strongly feel that such activities should be performed only outside the course work when we try to solve real world problems. Course assignments should be reasonably given based only the materials covered in video. This was taking too much time.

T

The discussion forums are not giving clear hints. When we are stuck in a problem, we are not able to proceed further. I still son't know the answers for certain problems because the coordinators do not explain the answers well. When we complete assignments we don't get to see the instructor's solution.

The video instructions were too fast paced. The instructors do not pause and explain critical aspects of the code.

Overall I am very disappointed with this course. There are much better videos on Youtube and Lynda than this . I am sorry. I never thought it would be this bad. The first course on Python from University of Michigan was really very good.

1.     Recommend immediate termination and removal of this course due to the disservice to the field. The course is so horrible it convinces students that data science is not for them.

2.     It appears that Brooks has only superficial understanding the material himself, as he is unable to explain it.

3.     Lectures are waste of time, consisting of watching Brooks speaking as someone types what he says into the files already downloaded.

4.     No relationship between lectures and homework assignments.

5.     Repeated references to promote Brooks’s book. Lectures are so useless, his book likely only suitable for lining birdcages.

6.     Repeated acknowledgment of inadequacy of lecture material with Stack Overflow cited as primary resource for learning.

7.     Homework assignments

a.     Incredibly poorly written, as if student inability to complete them is the principal objective.

b.     Auto-grader errors incomprehensible and fail to indicate which part of the assignment has issue.

c.      Auto-grader reports errors that are actually auto-grader processing problems. TA in discussion forums attempts to interpret, without success.

8.     Discussion forums

a.     TA complaints not enough time to support students

b.     TA agreement assignments poorly written

i.     Attempt to balance helping students without disclosing actual solution, with infrequent success

ii.     Repeated apologies and responds there are notes on where to improve (dated over a year ago, no changes made)

9.     I have been programming since yellow paper tape. I know a terrible course in my field when I see one.

With so many negative reviews, why are the problems in this course not addressed?

Very poor course, badly taught and terrible value for money. The lessons are brief beyond any form of reasonableness, the teacher seems completely unconnected with his students. There is no detail at all and no logical progression. I took and passed this course with a view to doing the specialisation but I'm not going to waste any more money on University of Michigan courses. I've found similar courses on other platforms which cover the same material. The assignments were awful, in some cases they covered material to be presented the following week, in others the questions were wrongly stated and did not match the output from the machine grading. The machine grading itself gave you no clue as to where you went wrong. I'm not talking about the odd question here or there, I'm talking about consistently throughout every assignment. I don't normally, in fact ever, leave bad reviews, I usually just chalk it up to experience and move on but in this case, the course was so bad, I had to say something. I've done two other courses on Coursera with Rice University and the difference to this course is huge, while I would wholeheartedly recommend the Rice Intro to Python courses, Don't do this course, it is not coherently presented or graded. The mentors in the forum tried their best but even they had to admit the grading system was riddled with errors. Absolute rubbish, avoid and spend your money elsewhere.

I thought this would be a good next step from py4e, but I went from feeling super confident and having everything explained very well and thoroughly to feeling like I'm being thrown into a 4th semester masters course and being expected to be able to keep up with everything. it's supposed to be an introductory course, but doesn't really explain anything. It's just like "look, this does this, this does that. If you wanna know more, which you do because we will test you on it, then look in the documentation" Constantly explaining things with tons of jargon that a person taking an introductory course obviously isn't going to know. And not explaining this jargon at all. Sometimes with some sentences I was cracking up at the idea that the person who made the video would really think I would know what they mean. There's no point in taking a course where they aren't going to teach you anything. If I wanted to do everything myself I wouldn't pay to take a course. Assignments often are completely different than what they discuss in the videos. They also talk and breeze through everything sooooooo fast. Really, really horrible course. Also really surprising that this has so many full star reviews but looking at the other 1 star reviews I can see that I'm deffo not alone in my experience.

I have just completed this course. I have learned quite a bit about the pandas library and that has nothing to do with this course.

The lectures seemed to be scripted; and extremely condensed. At best, they can be used as a sparse reference manual for some undefined subset of the pandas library.

The assignment 4 instructions encourage googling things. Basically "go forth and figure it out on your own" ... why would I need a full course for that piece of advice?

The autograder seems to forbid the usage of certain lines of code in Assignment 4. It will reject your answer and give you no feedback whatsoever with respect to the reasons why your answer was rejected.

As well, it has inconsistencies that will cost you time. The question on the recession_start() function will be graded as correct if recession_start() outputs a certain value, say x. Yet, in another question recession_start() is expected to output some other value y. Go figure. Not even a warning about it.

So, to sum up the salient points:

1. Autograder has holes.

2.Extremely condensed scripted lectures and sparsely sprinkled with practical advice.

3. Useful for letting you know that pandas exist.

Disappointing.

This course is poorly done, and I'm sorry but in no way close to an intermediate level. Even knowing a fair amount of python, I struggled with learning from this course. I find it ironic that the teacher specializes in education and mostly sits in a chair and speaks code at you. There are very few visual aids to help.

Furthermore, individual topics are not broken down well, showing you how to develop a mastery over the fundamental data objects like a data frame before moving on to the next. Code that is demonstrated is typed out unreasonably fast, and very few examples are done on how to properly access the elements in different ways. The video where the grad student/post doc spits out code 3 lines a minutes made me laugh at how ridiculous it was as if it were an explanation.

I ended up very frustrated with this course, and I'm not convinced it's all me or my inability to learn. I suggest learning data science in python from another site, I'm already finding a different class much better and more understandable. Your mileage will obviously vary.

A very solemn warning for those working professionals who wish to add this valuable skill or change career, which is so in my case, DON'T spend time on this course! The problem comes from a very error-prone auto-grader system and an outdated pandas library used by this course.

I understand the ability to research your solution in the absence of guidance is a valuable skill, which is what the course instructors claim. However, setting the student up with an outdated library where the student not only has to figure out how to search for their solution but navigate different library versions is just mean and irresponsible.

If you are planning to be a programmer, I do see the value of grinding this skill out of you. But if you are a domain expert that wants to learn "Applied Data Science" which is what this course is supposed to be for. I do not see the value of dropping the student in the deep end and having them figure out version updates and learn outdated syntax.

Our time is valuable, go learn from people who respect your time. I will.

Total disaster. I payed 315euro for this course. Course started on 24/10/2016. I faced with technical difficulties till this weekend. I reported this problem already many times.. Finally this weekend the Jupiter notebook worked and I started the first assignment. I spent many hours but still couldn't get solve the assignment. I read discussions, write post.. Searched on Google.. Read lots of document. I still couldn't get what the correct answer is the assignment wants. I realized that it is impossible to pass this exam. In the lectures they don't mention anything which will help you to solve this time consuming assignment by the way.. After having this terrible course experience this weekend, today (14/11/2016) I decided to apply for refund. But guess what I says 14 days have passed so I cannot get refund!!!! Now I payyed 315 euro for nothing but disappointment!!!!

Anything but 'Pandorable'.

My first programming class was 'Python for Everybody' by Dr. Chuck. It was perfect for a novice like me. Chuck was tough, but fair. I then moved on to this class. 'Intro to Data Science in Python' is the complete opposite of everything you'd want in a so called 'intro' class. Brooksy is impossible - no Dr. Chuck. He plows through course material like he's got somewhere to be causing you to re-watch each of his lectures multiple times. Proceeding to the assignments you immediately realize they aren't related in the slightest to the lectures you just consumed. This forces you to consult google, github, stackoverflow, your peers, and anyone else with an extensive programming background. That's all fine and dandy for, say, an advanced or intermediate class, but keep in mind, this is supposed to be an INTRO class...Good luck...

besides the major technical issues and lack of information before the postponed start of the course and minor technical issues, the way of teaching is well adapted to on-site classes where you can sit in study groups solving the problems together; the given examples have partly little relevance and do not help to solve the assignments and according to the staff the best way to solve assignments is by using google (or stackoverflow or whatever) - really?! somehow it seems they just took an on-site course, played with some fancy technical solutions and call it now a MOOC... they seem not really aware of the fact that on-site teaching and MOOCs require completely different types of pedagogic methods

amazing how the same university can offer both the best MOOC (Dr. Chuck's) and one of the worst (this one)

1)Auto grading for assignments worked on and off (mostly off). I spent far more time for the auto grading than the time I spent for actually doing the assignments and learning stuff. I considered quitting after the first week and had to really force myself to go on.

2) This course requires Python experience. This should be made more clear in the course description. I struggled a lot because I lacked Python experience.

3) The instructors have pacing issues - especially the teaching assistant. They rush the important points.

4) I think the difficulty level of the quizes and assignments is not encouraging learning. I considered quitting after the first week. I'd have easier and more motivating earlier quizes/assignments; then build up on them.

Big difference between this and some of the other classes offered by UM. Not sure if I will go further in this specialization because of it. The instructions on a couple of assignments were not clear, and dealing with the Jupyter system was at times a nightmare. Lots of hours wasted because of these two issues, as well as other things. Not crazy either about the instruction itself--went through material at times quickly, without a lot of explanation. I'm a working professional with a Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering. I don't mind spending time practicing concepts that are being taught, but I don't like precious time being wasted due to inefficiency. Not the good experience I've had with other UM classes.

Huge disappointment - the content is quite complex, however it is explained only with few videos at very high speed. The videos are not quite interactive. It could be more video hours on explanations and more in-video questions, just to check, whether the person got the concept step-by-step or not. But instead, this course is just few hours of video and the biggest part is based on the person to read the referenced books. Assignments are completely different topic. Very poor explanations of questions (discussion forums are actually full of questions that show, that question was poorly written).

After Chuck's Programming for Everybody, this course is just killing the mood.

This course could be really good, but it isn't. This is a "how to use Pandas with frustrating data-sets".

This course is just frustrating for students and mentors alike. I'm not sure why they're sticking to these confusing questions and assignments. I finished it out of sunk cost fallacy.

I really think with a little reworking (focusing less on pandas and not providing raw-dirty data, talking more about statistical method analysis), this course could be piles more incredible, and the mentors/staff would spend a lot less time answering questions on the lack of clarity on the assignments.

I'd recommend to find alternatives rather than do this course for now.