Learner Reviews & Feedback for Divide and Conquer, Sorting and Searching, and Randomized Algorithms by Stanford University

Mentor help is almost non-existent.

Very nice course with good faculty.

interesting and challenging course

Sometimes too much mathematics.

MORE OF THEORY LESS OF SOLVING

This course is excellent...

good.but, he is so fast!

well explained sir..!!!

good explanation

so challenging

very hard

Excellent

Great

Took me way more than 7 hours/week to go through course materials and complete the problem sets and programming assignments. Closer to 10. In general the estimates for how much time each assignment takes is way off (often claiming on the order of minutes, when the reality is for most students (myself included) it is likely on the order of hours).

That said, the programming assignments were challenging and fun (especially trying to do them in JavaScript), and I feel much more comfortable with recursion and Big-Oh.

The forums for the current session are not very active, but there are a lot of old posts from past offerings of the course, and I found that most of the time others had similar questions to me.

The textbook was helpful, but it pretty much has the same content as the lectures with maybe some extra practice and challenge problems. Unfortunately not all solutions to those problems are available, which can be very frustrating (I noticed at least one practice problem with no solution was used on the final exam, so that’s probably why...).

This course is a little more academic than practical in my opinion as a software engineer, but you have to start somewhere.

The idea and the content are excellent in terms of mathematic analysis. I would recommend people who want to do software engineering or computer science to pick up this course. However, I couldn't give stars higher than three because the videos aren't cut well; After week 2, a lot of written explanations in the video don't follow the audio; i.e., The teacher speaks faster than his writing. That is extremely confusing, and I have to go back to the lecture and read the subtitles back and forth a lot of times, to fully absorb the ideas. Otherwise, it's an outstanding lesson, and I recommend students to download the optional textbooks to get a better understanding.

for programming assignment please ask two question for each assignment

for example you ask to count no. of comparison in quicksort contain 10000 distinct integer. I urge mr. professor to provide this question as an example with just 20 integer only along with answer. So that we can check our program answer with this example and after then we will solve it with 10000 integer.

Thanks for this informative explanation and i m happy to learn other part also.

Sorry for my bad english.

I dont know wether my feedback is right or wrong

but Its just a humble request from a student to a teacher

I was glad to get exposure to famous algorithms through this class, but I don't feel like I really developed an intuition for reasoning about their runtime. The class was challenging, but mostly for the wrong reasons. I spent more time and energy pouring over the answers to tricky quizzes and having to implement algorithms exactly as described in the lecture notes rather than really truly learning. It also took me much longer than the 4-8 hours per week advertised to complete each week.

the course is great at the level of information , but has some issues:

1 - The sound of videos and instructor is not good.

2 - Some times the lectures were boring and not entertaining at all .

3 - you have to do an extra extra extra work to understand the related materials due to bad illustration during the course .

4 - if your math background is not ok or outdated don't rely on the course materials or the instructor illustration because they are not good

It would be nice to see more examples especially were we have too many formulas. I still confused with probability.

Also hadwritting isnt really helping. I am most of the time decoding scripts. In addition he is reading the formula at one moment and in around 3-4 seconds it appears on the screen. So I kind of listening him while trying to read what is happening on the screen. horrible experience.

This is not very beginner-friendly course, and what made it worse is that all the videos are out of sync (I don't know why this problem has not been addressed for 5 years), and the instructor's speaking manner is not easy to follow for a foreigner. Also a lot of the subtitles are just wrong. Otherwise a great course, if you keep on it you can learn a lot.

I do believe that feedbacks are very important during the learning section. Without feedbacks I would not understand whether I am doing ok or not. The Quiz and Homework would not handout the answer key and explanation after I have done. How am I suppose to be successful with the class if I don't understand which part I should strengthen.

This is a good course. I recommend everyone to take it. There are many details useful for you to learn. But it is not friendly. The words the professor used are not easy to follow for a non-native English, the way the exercises are designed is not reasonable. It could have been better.

The professor is very good. However, pictures and graphics mean a thousand words. These lectures rely too much on words. It makes it how to visualize the concepts. Hope to see more pictures. Animation will be the best.

The bad handwriting of the instructor is not a trivial issue as he pretends. He also talks very fast that makes it hard for people whose native language is not English to follow.

Seems a bit dated, videos are reused from older courses and sometimes don't fit well together anymore. Content is great and lots of fun to work through.