I wish I could give this a negative rating. I have, to varying degrees, enjoyed all of the other courses in the Cybersecurity certification. However, this course was entirely awful. I would have enjoyed the content of creating a website, using our knowledge, etc. if it had not been so poorly managed, poorly executed, and poorly put together. This course, put simply, was unorganized and broken, and did not work. After all of the hectic problems of getting the people in charge of the course to actually do their jobs and split us up, they wound up leaving us no method to communicate, so I had to do the entire assignment (supposed to be done by a group of 5) in less than a week (when we were supposed to get 2). The scheduling also did not make sense, as the course was supposed to run for 6 weeks but only lasted 5. Even aside from all of that, the prompts for the assignments were vague at best, and at some points were downright misleading. It was a terrible and stressful experience all around.

This course is terrible. There is no meaningful schedule and the instructors themself don't stick to it.

The group assignments were published one week after the first project deadline was officially over!

The submission system / review section is not suited to comply with the given task and provide the required feedback.

The capstone project is simply a mess and should be redesigned as a whole.

A great idea for a course, but utterly shambolic in its implementation. Who in their right mind would organize a course where "week 2" is actually weeks 2-3, "week 3" is actually weeks 4-5, and "week 4" is week 6? (This is a 5-week course, by the way.) The most important part of this course was the "break-it" assignment and peer review. This was supposed to award higher scores for the discovery of crashes (10pts) and vulnerabilities (15pts) than for other bugs (5pts) as described in the course outline. But instead we only got 5 points for bugs of any kind. (Finding an incorrectly labelled button in the menu: 5 pts; Discovering a vulnerability that allows the entire contents of the database to be decrypted: also 5 pts.) This resulted in a lot of wasted time as people had to submit and re-submit their reports many times to scrape through with a pass. According to the Discussion Forum page, there were six people available to help us with any problems: one instructor, two teaching staff, and three mentors. Five of them (including the instructor) were completely absent throughout the entire duration of the course, despite the many issues people had raised as the course unfolded. I couldn't possibly recommend this course to anyone.

The 4 courses which comprise the Cybersecurity course were mostly good and worthwhile. The capstone itself, sadly, was a total disaster. I would have never took it if I knew in advance it will be such a mess. I understand that the university was trying to be creative with it with all the best intentions in mind, but have to admit it didn't work for the course takers this time. I've done A LOT of courses on Coursera, this was the worst one by far :(

The organization of the project and the reviewing process is a mess. The "reading" documents describe something completely different than what is actually enforced by the assignments. For example, the "reading" documents say that you have 2 weeks to implement the project, but the assignment is ~1 week after the groups are defined. Criteria for the project evaluation are described differently in different places. The evaluation report of a project, where you should describe bugs, vulnerabilities, and rate the usability must be put into some ugly text boxes without possibility to format the text; source code is completely unreadable. There is also no way to upload a PDF or other document.

Worst of all: After someone reviewed your project, and maybe find some bugs, you don't even get informed about those (which would be very useful to learn what you could improve)..

Poorly coordinated and planned. I went and did my project solo, I enjoyed it but the peer review is just broken. First of all, how does Coursera let’s the University of Maryland title “Week 1 and Week 2” the first and upcoming weeks. They say weeks, but in reality it’s half a week. It’s 6 weeks integrated in 4 real weeks, how does that even work, how’s that allowed. Also, this course hasn’t thought web developing, I myself am a web developer but how are other students supposed to code a web app if this course has been about learning secure practices, techniques and pen testing. No coding (apart from C) has been even shown.

Peer reviews were awful. We’re supposed to replicate the stuff the team found in their own app, WE ARE NOT PROVIDED LINKS TO SAID APP, SO HOW IM SUPPOSED TO CORRECTLY CHECK EVERYTHING?! So you just have to trust that the included bugs and self reports are accurate.

Forum is not moderated at all. You can see many posts asking for “good score pls” or even projects submitted with “good score please” in areas were they had to explain the bugs they found.

The 2 stars are because the project is actually cool, but no teacher or even someone with authority will check your project, just other students giving you the maximum score because they don’t even know how to evaluate your project.

Lacl of support and proper information to finish the project.

The project is very useful and interesting but the grading process sucks completely. For Break-It section I suggest to implement sth like automatic assignment of projects to be reviewed by a student. Many of the students here were reviewing their own projects writing that there are no bugs and vulnerabilities found.

My rating for this course is 2, and I will explain why in a few points

1) The subject is really good and I have to say that if it were handled the way it should by everyone, it would be a challenging and very valuable final project for such a good specialization, with plenty of good material

2) The way the tasks after the initial assignment are presented is VERY confusing.

a. During the "Project evaluation", it seems like the only thing to evaluate is if you can access the systems created by the students. There is no way to give an evaluation about the actual functionality of the system and this is already illogical, because there are people who spend a great deal of effort in building a secure and functional system, in line with all the best practices, and others who do the bare minimum and sometimes even less. I saw PLENTY of plagiarized submission, including one of my own project, and plenty of links to non related websites, just to "try and pass it". This is very much discouraging for people who actually put quality and time in their work and try to meet all requirements. I seriously believe there should be some level of control to prevent these situations from happening (see point 3)

b. During the "Break it" phase, it is absolutely not clear what should be reviewed. Many people understand that they should be noting the bugs, vulnerability and crashes found in their own project and simply note that there were none. I don't blame them because the form to enter the review is very confusingly referring to "name your project in a descriptive manner" and makes it very hard to indicate which project(s) are being reviewed. There is no dedicated space to enter the link or name of the project and it's up to the student to do it. Also, one should ideally review more projects to find all the bugs, vulnerabilities and crashes needed to get the proper score to pass. Moreover, when submitted, the review form doesn't allow other users to copy the content, hence the only way to get to the URLs (hopefully) indicated by the reviewer is to read it and write it down manually...

3) Last point, and I can't stress enough how important this is, this course badly needs Mentors/Evaluators...

I saw multiple students, including myself, seeking advice and guidance on how to complete the tasks and I haven't seen a single reply from mentors. I was able to get some guidance only thanks to a direct connection I have with a person who used to be mentor for the course. Honestly, this is very disappointing for a paid course.

If anyone of the Coursera Admins is reading this, please contact me. I'll be glad to become a mentor and help future students navigate through the final step of what I think is a valuable specialization.

Lot of confusing course.

1) Week 2 is week 2 and 3. Week 3 is week 4 and 5.

2) There is no way to avail other projects individually. So the purpose of give grades based on found bug and vulnerabilities doesn't work.

3) The grade is not fair. 60% is given only if the home page is available.

4) The time is not enough. 1 week to develop an entire application.

The assignment input system for the course is quite poor and doesnt fit what really is requested.

Many users taking course are offering to falsely rate your project unless you rate their at 100%

In principal the task would be nice to learn a lot of things and interesting, but the realization is very bad, be warned! If I would have known before I would have taken another specialization for Cybersecurity and not this one. First you can do the capstone project only 2 times a year on specific dates, second the mentors seem not to be active anymore and don't reply, third you need a quite a huge knowledge of web development that is not taught in the rest of the specialization or in this course, at least I have not found any hint for this and was not prepared. And there are many other negative things I don't want to go into detail further, avoid to take it is my recommendation if possible and look for something else!

This is one of the best project I have done in my life. This project gives you insights into how to build secure applications. It has three different rounds including a built-it round, break-it round and fix-it round and each of them were equally challenging and fun.

I would recommend everyone to take this capstone project and you won't regret your investment ever.

curso muy interesante, los instructores se dan a entender muy bien

This course is very interesting and useful.

Thank you very much.

Mil Gracias U. Maryland, Mil Gracias Coursera.

I have learnt a lot in this track

Awesome experience!

Excellent course!

it was awesome