Learner Reviews & Feedback for Analyze Data to Answer Questions by Google

This module is honestly very badly made.

Firstly, there is a lack of explanation on more complex queries.

Secondly, some of them do not work and give syntax errors even after trying multiple times.

Thirdly, I encountered a question on the weekly challenge that was marking the right answer as wrong and suggesting the wrong one was correct.

There are a lot of similar complains in the week 4 of this module in the discussion. For an important module that is heavily covered in SQL, it should have been better made. Unfortunately, I will have to redo SQL in a different course to learn better.

I'm a little disappointment in the teaching format here - it seems like there should be more structure and repetition of concepts. I was really discouraged in Week 1 where the Qwiklabs project was totally out of scope for the rest of the Week 1 syllabus - I found myself copying and pasting SQL without any context about meaning. I feel that there should be a whole module of videos about just using some of the Spreadsheet and SQL functions via elementary case studies. I understand everything in the moment and pass the tests, but I don't feel like this necessarily prepares me for the job.

The difficulty level has gone up so high from the previous module.

It was quite difficult to follow on some part of the module.

although the reading material is very well constructed, but in that particular course all video materials were useless to me; the instructor talked so fast, she went through complicated formulas and queries with a very quick pace making it impossible to follow with her

Does the instructor even know that this is a course for beginners who have zero experience with SQL ? She was too fast in SQL Queries, and she wasn't even explaining why and what is she doing, frankly you could've added all SQL videos without any commentary from her and it wouldn't have a made any difference.

Will have to study SQL from a different source. Very poorly put course.

Could use some work - possibly spending more time breaking down the SQL sections and rearranging the order of some of the videos/readings.

There are lack of practices on session of subqueries.

It is the worst course amongst all courses of this certificate..

Some part of the course goes into very basic and some part of the course goes to advance part very fast.

Entire course Audio is too low.

The course contains very basics of Data analysis.

Well, we didn't answer many questions in that course. We did, however, get the copy/past SQL queries, watch presenters write SQL queries, putting more effort in spelling out the name of the database that they were querying than actually explaining the query itself. Oh, yes, and at one of the labs, we did get to see a solution which was incorrect and made no sense.

Courses 1-4 all had great flow. Each course left me with the feeling of building towards the next step in the data analysis process. This course fell short of that. Compared to the preceding courses, this course came across as disorganized and most of the lessons simply reviewed skills presented in previous courses. For the course focused on the analyze step of a data analytics certificate, I expected much more than a scattered review of previous concepts.

There needs to be a QA review of the quizzes for Course 5. Some of the quizzes mark correct answers as wrong. I have literally plugged a formula into a spreadsheet (ie, vlookup section) or tested a SQL query with my own data set and I was able to get the correct answer, but it was marked as wrong on the quiz. Other quiz questions just didn't make much sense, like a question where a group by clause was supposed to be used but the group by field wasn't included in the select statement. The errors/inconsistencies are frustrating. I didn't have these problems with courses 1 - 4.

Questions aren't being answered. We aren't able to get direct answers on specifics. It feels like no one is manning the course.

Pace is too high, sometimes you need to use external resources to supplement the course material.

Good information, well delivered. The only thing I don't like are the QwikLabs. They're awkward to get into, and then a lot of the instructions involve cutting and pasting SQL queries rather than learning to type and format them yourself. I try to understand what I've pasted, but in the more complex ones I still have trouble. The course (and earlier ones) should take more time on simpler queries typed in manually before moving on to cutting and pasting for complex queries.

Need more SQL exercises

Information seemed to be hodgepodge at times. Oddly put together and had the feeling of being crammed.

Covers a lot of material that was already covered in other courses. ideally would focus more on the advanced uses of SQL - which it does to an extent - only more

SQL part was lacking. To use the analogy of chess, you can know how the pieces move, but that's not what learning chess is about, the amount of possibilities to achieve the goal is endless and not all are equally effective. I was hoping this course would teach more about how to use SQL smartly and effectively to solve complex problems. Instead, all I got is SQL syntax with fairly simple examples of applying it.

This course failed in terms of explaining the more complex SQL queries. The instructor did not explain the logic behind some of her queries, made too many mistakes, and the hands-on assignments were all about copying and pasting. Also, the reflect questions were too repetitive and meaningless.

The concepts covered in this course were presented well. It does seem that a lot of this course felt more like part 2 of the "Process" step instead of the "Analyze" step. This course helped with learning many new SQL an Spreadsheet functions, however I feel if perhaps some introductory Statistics were included, it would help with the goal of the "Analyze" phase, which is to find trends and relationships in the data.

This is probably the least interesting course in the series so far. It only revolves around more processes to manipulate and clean data without giving insights in actual analysis. I think it wouldbe great if it included some tools for searching for correlations, the differetn types of relationships among variables (linear, logarithmic, exponential, etc.), discussing about correlation and/or causation, etc., two variables relationships and multiple variables relationships, and so on.

The Google docs/spreadsheets for the project are all locked. I do not have access to them. I have reported the problem numerous times. It has yet to be fixed nor have I received a response.

My hands are not dirty in SQL

This is definitely the weakest course in this specialization so far which is telling, because the whole package and concept has been extremely bad so far. Please be aware that you will not learn how to analyze data, in spite of the title. You will learn about a bunch of – useful, I admit – formulas and functions, but there is no mention how to read the results you receive and what are they telling you. Please note the use of the word “about” in the previous sentence. This is deliberate. You will not learn how to use the functions, different situations they might come useful etc. They are shown with no context whatsoever. This applies mostly to the SQL commands. We are bombarded with more and more complex functions with absolutely no explanation, and the quizzes and challenges openly instruct: copy and paste this command and see what happens. Google evidently has zero respect for the students and just wanted to join the mass MOOC hysteria that started during the pandemic.

I have no idea who is the target audience for this specialization and this course in particular. On one hand, they treat you as if you’d never seen a spreadsheet or even a number before, on the other, in order to understand certain topics you need to already be an expert. I really don’t understand why didn’t google create separate courses for SQL and spreadsheets using the BigQuery and Google Sheets respectively. Instead, we have this vague and pointless division into “preparing data for exploration”, “cleaning data” etc. that is generally superficial and repetitive.