MF
Sep 22, 2020
A good course for learning and apply sql to conduct analysis on ab testing results. Would be better if the instructor could provide more info about how to design and apply AB Testing on the customers
SP
Jul 29, 2019
The instructor is very smart and her syllabus is very easy to follow. The real life examples are great and helps put ideas in perspective! I would definitely recommend this course and already have!
By Ben
•Aug 23, 2020
The content is good, i appreciate that linking SQL with some data science subject such as AB test. that's the main reason for me taking this course.
By eyogiddy
•Dec 9, 2022
The course was average. The course was mostly theory with little practical application. The course did not have enough examples
By Tadas
•Oct 21, 2022
A subject is very interesting and usfull, however sometimes it lacks more clear explanation and assigments are a bit confusing
By QianHe
•Jun 12, 2020
It seemed a bit disjointed. The instructor seemed nervous. Some of the solutions to the exercises seemed overly complicated.
By MAURICIO C
•Aug 27, 2024
Por su complejidd no se si sea apropiado para principiantes. El efecto puede ser contrario al de motivar el aprendizaje.
By Raza A
•Dec 25, 2022
It's a good course, in that you will learn a lot. However, it's a rather steep learning curve from Course 1 to Course 2.
By Xuan T D
•Apr 12, 2023
the exercises are closed to the real world problem. But I need to have a more constructive and well-instructed course.
By Josue J R B
•Sep 16, 2022
muy buen curso para desafiarnos en lo aprendido, sin embargo las preguntas realizadas son ambiguas en cieertos casos
By Ifunanya J
•Dec 6, 2022
The tutor does not know how to impact knowledge. It was like she was talking to herself.
By Emily M
•Jan 16, 2023
A lot of the assignment information is unclear. The final assignment being one of them.
By Cjoy L
•Apr 12, 2020
Very difficult, better if there are more practice exercises and examples illustration
By Itay L
•Aug 28, 2024
Videos and the concepts are very good. the practice exercises are not clear enough
By XU H
•Jul 6, 2023
The dataset is not consistent with the solution, the Mode platform is not handy.
By Alexander S G
•Jun 8, 2024
not enough instructions for final project
By Iván A A
•Jun 28, 2020
The project's instructions are not clear.
By Fredy C
•Oct 30, 2022
Exercises were unclear in the wording.
By Azka A
•May 10, 2020
The lectures could be more detailed.
By Sachin G
•Jun 15, 2020
No good course
By Lea P
•May 2, 2021
I definitely learned a lot during this course. I gave a 2 star rating because there are a number of issues/loss of time while taking this course
1 Practice sessions:
- Questions are often unclear, not guiding you to what you actually need to get to.
- Answers as given as a video. It's good to get a couple explanation about some steps, but often the code shown is incorrect, and the teacher spends minutes trying to correct it. Also, THE ANSWER SCRIPT IS NOT GIVEN. So you have to waste your time copying every line to test out their script! Very inefficient
- You have to add a comment to the practice exercise to move on to the next step. All these responses (thousands of them, random word/comment to move on) will show up in the forum discussion when you try to find an answer to some of your questions . The coursera search engine is pretty inefficient. So combined with these tens of thousands of unuseful comments, it's impossible to find the answer to any question.
- I looks like the instructors are not very active. I encountered a lot of posts in the forum that had no answers. And given the low number of people currently doing this course, it's unlikely that you'll get an answer to your posts.
2. Final assignment:
- Low traffic on course: There's no peer assignment to review. And no one to review yours.
- Exam questions are often unclear. So the least would be to clearly state what you'll be graded on, rather than finding this out when you submit your assignment
- Often refers to a script made sometime during the course. Very hard to find which script they are actually talking about, so you have to go on a scavenger hunt every time. That's also the case in practice questions
Kat, thanks for the course. I'm sure you put a lot of efforts in creating this course and content, but in order to turn this into a great course, you need to have people test it and use the feedback to improve it.
It's a shame that the instructors to this course will probably never read these comments, so this course will stay as a draft course forever. I don't know much about UC Davis, but with a course like this, I'm unlikely to recommend a UC Davis Course or a UC Davis degree to anyone.
By Rita L N
•Aug 24, 2020
This course is not nearly as good (or even "good") as the first course of this specialization. Concepts are taught too vaguely and the material is scattered in an order which doesn't make sense. It would have been helpful to know from the _beginning_ the tricks for coding in Mode, such as selecting multiple lines to comment out...instead, those tips were placed in the middle of the entire course as an aside. I wasted so much time looking up how to multi-line comment-out (couldn't find an answer) and ended up doing it the long way until that point of the course...when she could have mentioned it _from the very beginning_!
The idea of do-it-yourself exercises and answers-video was nice, but the instructor was not helpful during these videos. She mumbled a lot through her actions, so it was like a puzzle trying to figure out the rationale and intention behind her decisions. Lots of vague language...I get that sometimes things can be vague because this course can't cover every scenario, but I could find better explanations elsewhere online.
I spent more time looking up outside resources for things like pivot tables and windowing functions (not taught in the previous course) than learning it on Coursera. I'm left feeling like I spent money to teach myself these things, and could have saved the money I spent on this course.
All-in-all, I couldn't finish the course. I spent about 16 hours trying to perform the 5 steps to complete the final project for A/B testing the given dataset, and I wasn't even able to recreate the table she wanted to start the thing off.
This feels so bad. I hardly ever give up on something, but because there's no instructor feedback and almost no feedback from other students, there's just no way I can get through this. What a disappointing experience.
By Derek E
•Mar 9, 2021
Most of the negative reviews for this course are accurate in my opinion. After reading the reviews, I decided to give the course a try anyway and I'm pretty disappointed that I invested as mush time in it as I did. The hands on exercises from the first week were beneficial and helped reinforce the learning from the first course in the specialization. Beyond that, I would say that the course seemed to lack an effective plan aimed at developing students SQL skills. It was apparent that the instructor is both knowledgeable and competent in SQL, however that knowledge and competency didn't translate into the ability to transfer knowledge to others via the course content.
I would of liked to have seen the presentations structured like those from the first course of the specialization. It would have been beneficial to have ER diagrams for the databases used in the hands on exercises. I can't say that the coding videos were much help, as there was little to no explanation as to what the instructor was doing and found myself struggling to stay awake while watching them. By the third week of the course, it seemed apparent that the specialization lacked an overall plan and the courses were created on an individual basis, rather than by a team working together to execute a well thought-out learning plan.
I wish I could give this course a better rating, but beyond the hands-on exercises from the first week, I wouldn't recommend the time investment to anyone, even those interested in pursuing the specialization.
By Daniel J
•Sep 23, 2020
While I appreciate the numerous practice exercises in this course, the experience overall was incredibly frustrating.
On the one hand, it's hard to check my practice queries against the instructor's recommendations when the solutions videos contain so many mistakes and so much typing. The instructions themselves were often confusing, and I wouldn't realize until watching the video that I had completely misunderstood large portions of the assignment. Because each query builds on the previous one, this meant going back and redoing the entire exercise.
On the other hand, I found several mistakes in the quizzes and support materials. It was easy enough to figure out what the answer was supposed to be, but this was still annoying for a paid course.
Most frustrating of all was the final project, however. The assignment itself was good, but having to submit it as a Mode report was incredibly confusing--it wasn't at all clear how I was supposed to show my work, and it would have been much easier to submit a text file with my code instead. After all, the peer reviewing students have access to the same databases and can quickly run my code to make sure it checks out.
Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, since I've taught data cleaning for Stata and therefore probably have higher standards than most students. But I can only imagine how lost most students are in this course, since it's only the second level in the SQL certificate, and I imagine most do not have a technical/coding background.
By keypad2849
•Apr 15, 2021
Kat is a charming teacher. I think she really has a passion for it and that comes across. But the course itself is extremely poorly structured. I found myself not caring about the data (oh no!) very quickly in. I think in an effort to teach how vague questions about data can be (a good lesson...) the course became very vague and scattered itself.
Exercises are unclear and I found myself unable to complete them or even know what was being asked. The online applet through Mode worked OK, but was frustrating to learn and with no ER diagram for the databases we were supposed to use, it was a bit overwhelming. The minute you start typing, it comes up with suggestions for a million connected databases or functions, and you don't know what belongs to the course and what is default etc etc. It's a very frustrating experience.
The PDFs for the coursework are underdefined, they don't always reflect the state of the database as you find it, and the solutions videos themselves are badly edited - there was one video where I sat through minutes of Kat solving a bug on her computer trying to get a graph displayed (nothing to do with the course!) before she gave up, ended the video, and moved us on to part two, where it picked up after she'd fixed the bug.
Course needs to be much tighter to be useful.
By Brent S
•Jun 21, 2021
This course has a lot of important things to teach and mostly accomplishes those goals. However, the structure of the course leaves much to be desired, it expects you to know SQL skills that weren't taught in the first course of the series, and, most importantly, doesn't respect your time. For instance, the course has you reference code from screenshots for problems rather than text of the code (you can't copy and paste from a screenshot). Additionally, the final test expects for you to reference code from the lectures or already have advanced SQL knowledge so I ended up having to rapidly resume/pause the videos while the lecturer was scrolling just to get the starter code to work with (it also didn't tell you what table to reference for the test scenario).
Kat seems like an incredibly intelligent and kind person that would be great to learn from outside of this course as she has a wealth of knowledge, but there are just some basic fundamentals to a course's structure that this lacks that make this course much harder than it really needed to be. I learned a lot about what you can do with SQL and am better off for it, but there are just some basic things that can be done from a quality assurance standpoint that NEED to be done before this course is recommendable.
By Alexander H H
•May 26, 2021
This course was an absolute mess. I am not sure that I learned a single useful thing throughout the time that I spent on it. The quizzes usually included questions that were poorly worded in a way that prompted incorrect responses. Even when that wasn't a problem, questions that asked which video covered a specific question occurred. These questions are lazy, unhelpful, and a terrible way to try to teach understanding of a concept. The videos were also not great, and frequently barely skimmed the surface of concepts that seem important. Even the final project included at least one problem that was worded in a way that made absolutely no sense, and seemingly asked for impossible to produce code. An unintended concept that I did learn while taking this class is to use Google to help you imporve your code, because 5 minutes on Google was more helpful than an hour of trying to decipher this nonsense.
If you need this class for the SQL for Data Science specialization, just try to get through it. If you actually hope to learn anything, skip this course. You can teach yourself everything it covers considerably better than they do.