still errors in quizzes after notification in beta-test. No-one from staff replies to comments or forums. I really want to give it 3.5, not 4
I have learnt quite a few things in this course. However, I will point out that you must be very attentive and not too surprised when you find a mistake, as they are common. I will leave aside the fact that there weren't many classmates around, which prevents you from having meaningful conversations in the forums and feedback on your peer-reviewed assignments, but I believe it is of interest to realize this soon enough as to not have unrealistic expectations. I was especially disappointed with the quality of the quizzes and other assignments: there were many mathematical expressions that weren't formatted correctly which made it very hard to decipher them. Apart from having badly formatted questions (containing spelling mistakes here and there), there are a few instances where even the answers gathered from the grading tools are wrong in some cases and at the very least ambiguous in other cases. I knew most of the material before taking the course and I was unable to achieve a perfect grade, partly due to the fact that there is absolutely no support from the teaching staff and partly due to the grading system used by the university. On the positive side, most of the videos were engaging in my opinion and all the concepts presented are directly useful to any computer scientist. I particularly enjoyed the first half of the course on number bases and modular arithmetic. Depending on your background, you may find the second half of the course somewhat basic, yet still useful. Overall, I would recommend other courses such as CS50 by Harvard University before this one if you are looking for a certificate. Otherwise, you can skip assignments, do not worry too much about the grades and learn important concepts from this course as a great mathematical foundation in computer science.