Learner Reviews & Feedback for Financial Engineering and Risk Management Part I by Columbia University

Very Interesting course. I would put more exercises

The course is extremely Challenging but worth.

It was a great course, a bit advanced though.

It has better content provided than ours.

The background material is in Week 8.

Great course. Highly recommend.

Finding it interesting

Very good course...

Gorgeous

Thanks

g

G

The course is OK. You can learn the material if you work hard to find external sources to help.

A few problems with the course... First, the people speaking in the lectures seem to be speed reading off of a piece of paper, trying to make every video below a certain time threshold. It feels less like teaching, and more like listening to someone read. Second, the handwriting is pretty bad throughout, sometimes illegible. Third, the course significantly lacks example problems along with solutions (showing work) to those problems. Lastly, this course lacks practicality. It would be nice to understand more about uses (expand on calibration of binomial options models, for example).

I have coded some examples for those looking for an extra place to learn the algorithms/math associated with some of the important points of this course: https://github.com/amittleider/FinancialEngineering .

The course content is excellent and is very wisely chosen. However more simplification is necessary. For a student with good knowledge of financial derivatives but limited knowledge of the mathematics behind it, the explanation provided by the instructors may prove to be highly insufficient (from week 4 onwards). More examples should be added by the instructors so as to make the content interesting. Interview with Emmanuel Derman was note worthy.

One more suggestion - the exercises seemed difficult in relation to the course content. A slight mismatch in the answers ( 5.62 vs 5.63) is taken as an incorrect entry. The instructors may consider providing a short range of correct answers in the system so that such mismatches do not occur.

The material is engaging, interesting, and challenging; the instructors' lectures are generally good quality and easy enough to follow. However, some of the quizzes are horrendous and lead to hours upon hours of frustration as you try to get the EXACT answer to enter into the input box in order for it to be accepted as "correct". Some of quizzes rely far too much on the minutiae of Excel spreadsheet fine-tuning and can be VERY frustrating to navigate. It might be better to test general understanding of concepts or find some other way to design these quizzes. Otherwise, good course.

The basic ideas are taught very nicely in the course, but I would have wished to see some more advanced maths such as some integrals computed in order to determine option prices and maybe a continuous time (BDT) model. At some point it was tiring to go through the binomial model.

Nevertheless the course was very interesting. Thank you very much!

I learned a lot during the course. Here are my few suggestions:1) a person should be familiar with basics as the course is highly non-descriptive.....you might confuse between financial terms time to time. 2) i think the flow of the course can be improved.The most enjoyable and tricky parts are the quizs,they are tough to crack.

I think this course is good and gives me some useful knowledge. However, the most disadvantage is that it is lacked of example and that makes us really hard to understand and do quiz. I rank 3 stars for this course with the hope that the disadvantage will be improved to make the course more perfect.

I liked how binomial model was covered, clearly explained each product pricing. I also liked mortgage module explanation - with examples of the calculation in excel. However, in the first two weeks the teacher reads formulas from presentation without explaining and linking to the real examples.

The lectures weren't always easy to follow but the quizzes were really useful as they meant it was necessary to understand the material. Definitely a useful course, I will be interested to see how it relates to the real world of derivatives pricing.

It wasn't always easy to follow along with the content and I really relied on the forums to understand how to work out the answers to the questions as there was way more theory than practised examples using actual numbers in the lectures.

Overall good, with a smooth stream of thoughts. However, some details still needed to be discovered on your own. The theory behind is not perfectly illustrated.

I wish it could be harder and have more challenging quizzes than simply arithmetic and multiple choice.

Lack of examples/problems worked out in the videos. Can be difficult to pass quizzes accordingly

No fue lo que esperaba. Los instructtores no dieron su mejor presentacion.