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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Data Science in Python by University of Michigan

4.5
stars
27,081 ratings

About the Course

This course will introduce the learner to the basics of the python programming environment, including fundamental python programming techniques such as lambdas, reading and manipulating csv files, and the numpy library. The course will introduce data manipulation and cleaning techniques using the popular python pandas data science library and introduce the abstraction of the Series and DataFrame as the central data structures for data analysis, along with tutorials on how to use functions such as groupby, merge, and pivot tables effectively. By the end of this course, students will be able to take tabular data, clean it, manipulate it, and run basic inferential statistical analyses. This course should be taken before any of the other Applied Data Science with Python courses: Applied Plotting, Charting & Data Representation in Python, Applied Machine Learning in Python, Applied Text Mining in Python, Applied Social Network Analysis in Python....

Top reviews

CB

Feb 6, 2023

The assessments, quizzes, and course coverage are quite good. The main points are covered, although it does not cover everything. Additionally, it provides opportunities to learn and conduct research.

PK

May 9, 2020

The course had helped in understanding the concepts of NumPy and pandas. The assignments were so helpful to apply these concepts which provide an in-depth understanding of the Numpy as well as pandans

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5551 - 5575 of 5,951 Reviews for Introduction to Data Science in Python

By Dheeraj s

Jun 20, 2020

asfsdgdfgdxgghj

By Damini R

May 19, 2020

GOOD EXPERIENCE

By GoldenTeeth C

Jul 20, 2018

作业描述不清楚,有歧义!!!

By Shubhi V

Jul 25, 2020

less hands on

By Sayyaparaju N V V V

May 9, 2018

Nice one :)

By GIRIRAJ B

Jan 28, 2019

Good course

By abhishek

Jun 10, 2020

very brief

By MariaStephan J

May 11, 2020

very fast

By Arya P

Jul 2, 2020

Too fast

By Tushar T

Aug 17, 2023

wknfkd

By Weerachai Y

Jun 29, 2020

thanks

By MAURICIO Y P

Mar 18, 2022

good

By CHILUKOTI N A

Sep 28, 2020

good

By Govardhani S

Aug 6, 2020

good

By Aayesha N

Jul 30, 2020

Nice

By Aansh S

Jul 10, 2020

good

By Bicky G

Jun 13, 2020

nice

By GOWTHAM M

May 22, 2020

good

By xiao h

Oct 22, 2019

太难了8

By DELA C J K (

Oct 12, 2019

HARD

By Mohammad J

Aug 5, 2017

good

By Pranav P

Jun 17, 2021

ok

By Yash V B

May 20, 2020

ok

By Irfan S B

Oct 4, 2017

A

By Richard H

Jul 29, 2019

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.)