Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Statistics by Stanford University

It's an Introduction to Statistics and it means it should help those who are new to statistics. But it's way far from that.

The instructor explains topics very very very very and again very summarized. While he drops mind boggling formulas on to the screen, he explains you the 1/100 of the tip of the ice berg.

You just cannot use this course for an introduction to statistics. You need a lot of books and a lot of time to get the quizzes right.

Enjoyed the course but had repeating problems with the Coursera platform not submitting quizzes for weeks. Coursera provided no support and no communication (zero). Had to contact Stanford administration to get any action on the problem. Still Coursera did not communicate and were slow to respond to the school administration. Finally fixed two days before course deadline.

Critical bugs in the Coursera platform. Absolutely no response from Coursera to flagged bug reports. Absolutely no Coursera support. Cannot recommend.

Excellent content - explains complex concepts in simple words. Though i had prior knowledge of statistics and i undertook this course as part of the Foundation in Data science course, i found this excellent content.

The course is great for those who want to brush up on the foundational statistical concepts for advanced learning. If Prof. Walther offers more educational content that's relevant to me, I'd gladly take it!

Good material, very very dry instructor.

Lots of material, personable professor, good course.

Good intro to the principles of statistics

Very good introduction to Statistics!

Good basic course with good pace.

This course covers the most popular statistical ideas (it closely follows the O'Reilly book "Practical Statistics for Data Scientists"), so the material is relevant. Unfortunately, the course is not designed well for comprehension. The instructor glosses over things very quickly, and fails to define crucial terms and concepts. For instance, he never once says "this is the formula for deriving the standard deviation," instead he only ever says "now we will standardize" and you need to know what he means. When calculating probability in the early lessons, he does not pause to help you learn how to assign A and B, nor does he stop to say which values he has assigned to A and which to B. As of May 2020, halfway into what I believe is the first iteration of the course, the Forums were not turned on so we cannot seek help from our classmates, even though about 3,000 are currently enrolled. I'm five weeks in and completely undecided about whether to continue or not; I am not learning statistics; for the most part I am just retaking the tests over and over again until I pass. Please at a minimum turn on the forums for students. But also consider re-recording the Probability section to include more instruction about how to assign variables to A and B, and to more clearly specify what the teacher considers to be A and B in the course examples. IAlso, if the profession consistently uses the phrase "standardize" to mean "calculate the standard deviation" please say that somewhere. n addition, the Week 3 Quiz includes a question not covered until the Week 4 material.