I have a passionate dislike for peer graded assignments. There is nothing worse than having to redo an assignment two or three times because your 'peers' lack the language skills or understanding of your submission to grade it appropriately. If this were a free course I would happily accept peer grading as a cost of education. But for a paid course, to have someone who is in the process of learning the material grade my understanding of it is unacceptable. Peer graded assignments are actually the reason I will be discontinuing my Coursera specializations and search for an alternative source of online e

Why should my course completion be held back because other participants are not available to review my submission and provide feedback...this is very unfair and I feel complete wastage of my money.

The submissions should have been reviewed by professors and there should have been a SLA for review like 2 days, 3 days etc. This otherwise seems like a open ended program, depending on the whims and mercy of other candidates!

I'd like to express my sincere appreciation to all the professors, instructors and staffs who had put such great effort in putting together this extensive Specialization.

I enjoyed all the contents in this Specialization.

However, much as I enjoyed working on the Capstone project, I have to say I found the peer review system to be degrading the overall quality of the course and the Specialization.

With peer reviews, you can't guarantee a reasonable and valid evaluation.

Firstly, you can't get any meaningful feedback.

I found most peers did such quick jobs with the evaluation that out of 12 feedbacks I received throughout the course, there was just one comment that was thought-provoking to some extent. All the rest were something like "Good job" and "I like it", with something as meaningless as "N/A".

Secondly, the quality and the validity of the evaluation is in question.

As I was evaluating other peer students' works, I came to think some students didn't quite understand the essence of the assignment. You are asked to propose a strategy for action to solve the problem of ad-blockers. Many of the works I reviewed didn't have sufficient actions to solve it, though. For example, some proposed to do descriptive analytics. Doing descriptive analytics alone doesn't solve anything, let alone the ad-blocking problem.

The problem here, though, is not that some students are not understanding the essence of business analytics and the assignment associated with it. It's the fact that those students are evaluating others' works. I do not see how such students can provide anyone with valid evaluation.

In the Forum, I came across a comment from few years back pointing out something similar. The course instructor answered to that comment, saying students are eligible to review others' works because they completed the series of courses, and thus have the required knowledge.

There is a significant difference between figuring out the answers to multiple-choice questions to complete the courses and actually understanding the essence of the business analytics. This is now obvious because I had to give low points to some of peer students.

Lastly, the peer review system made the Forum meaningless as well. The Forum was filled with comments begging for reviews, and it made it almost impossible to find any meaningful discussion about the project. I think even the instructors gave up on going through the forum to find discussion threads they actually needed to pay attention to. I asked a simple question about the project description, but no instructor bothered to answer. I can understand why it occurred, because my question got buried under a pile of review requests soon after I posted it.

I took this Specialization with an expectation that I learn from the best. I hope you revisit the course structure so that the Capstone project, which has a potential of being a great learning experience, would actually be worthy of being a part of this Wharton Specialization.

From my perspective, the individual courses that made up the "Capstone" (people, customer, accounting, and operations analytics) were both educative and interactive. These individual courses contained data focused problems and gave a general overview of the specific field.

However, the final "Capstone" project was entirely disappointing and something I even plan to complain to Coursera about. After having a two month delay, the course not only lacked any direction, but seemed to be put together last minute without any real thought or plan. The entire "Capstone" was driven by hypotheticals, almost all of which did not have any relevance to the past four courses. An educated individual could easily complete this "Capstone", without any knowledge whatsoever from the previous four courses. The "Capstone" provided a few articles and videos related to the issue (Yahoo Ad Blocker) to help us solve the problem, but clearly the course heavily lacked content. I was expecting the course to contain hypothetical data for us to interact with and predict how the Ad blocker problem and our proposed solutions would drive the data of Yahoo's business. However, the course merely was driven by complete hypotheticals that only required one to be educated about general business functions. This "Capstone" hardly related to the previous four courses, and it is a scam that this course cost $99.

A bit frustrated with the peer review mechanism since one of my peer rated me zero points claiming that he/she sees that I've only completed the application exercise on my submission. However, I think he/she might have overlooked since the other 2 peers have rated me highly. Also, I appreciate that students have to submit their own assignment before reviewing peers, I believe this is to reduce chance of plagiarism. Unfortunately, since the portal allow re-submission, there's a short window where students can submit a "fake" assignment, then review & copy peers' assignment and re-submit. I got to review a peer's "work" that is EXACTLY the same with my own work. A review in scoring mechanism might be needed. Otherwise, the course is a good summary and application exercise of previous modules.

I think may be a little bit more description about what are the requirements are needed to enroll in courses as customer analytics which the learners should have a good statistics skills.

The course provides a case. We have to identify the problem. I appreciated the fact that how I define a problem decides on how I propose to address it. A different definition leads to altogether different steps! The course also provides a good template and sufficient guidelines to help us develop a strategy to address the problem we have defined. Finally , we have to think about how we can test if our strategy is viable. We are also guided to think about the changes that might be necessary in our organization in terms of structure, KPIs, skills etc. Given the nature of this capstone project one cannot expect it to be too specific and have a heavy application of analytics. What it does is provide you with a good idea of how to put all that you have learned in each of the specializations in a comprenesive manner, and that how these ideas fit together to create a big picture. If you are looking at complex number crunching excerices then you will not find it here. If you are looking for excerices that will make you think and think and think then you will be quite satisfied. I am!

I am utterly furious about how much plagiarism I encountered in this course. While I personally found doing the activities helpful, the peer review that is used to determine 100% of your grade is not helpful. I experienced a situation in which someone I reported for plagiarism (had literally downloaded someone else's entire project and not bothered to edit their name off of it when submitting) went on to grade TWO of my assignments, and consistently graded me a full point to two points lower than everyone else per question. This included on questions that were not open to interpretation, such as "were all of the application activities answered?" Yes, they most certainly were. Did they deduct points? You bet. At best, this is allowing somebody who has no basis to grade things as a peer to determine outcomes for others; at worst, this reads as retaliation, as there are only so many of us taking a course at a time; it's not hard to figure out who might have flagged plagiarism. Plagiarism cheapens the value of the credential that is being issued here. The disincentives to prevent plagiarism from Coursera are clearly not strong enough, and it really marred my experience of this course.

This course was terribly underwhelming. There is no interaction from the Wharton staff, nothing that connects this to anything learned in the specialization, and nothing that even resembles a case study. Grades are subjectively assigned on a very narrow grading scale by peers and the format of the assignment doesn't allow for enough explanation to develop a thesis. of Any information given to the student is from magazine/newspaper/journal articles without data and we are tasked with identifying a business solution to a problem with little context. Very disappointed in this offering. After taking the Data Analysis specialization offered through Duke University I know what a capstone course should be and this course is so far from that it should be removed from the course catalog.

Provided nothing of value or relevance to the previous courses. Additionally there was essentially no input from Wharton instructors.

While some of the courses were more difficult than others, I was overall impressed with the certification. Highly recommended for any business generalist looking for a basic introduction to the analytics field.

I am very grateful for the learning and practice that I can give to this graduation project, which has made me gain a lot in strategic decision-making and business analysis.

If you apply yourself fully to the capstone project you will get a lot out of it. It is indeed true that the project is dated. The problem and solutions of adblocking are known. So at a minimum you will have a head-start. The research and development of your strategy, and applying the analytics skills you have learnt is where the real work is and would parallel the sort of rigor that would go into a real world situation strategic deck.

Of course it would be ideal if the project was assessed by a Wharton professor. However, that would significantly change the cost structure.

I was disappointed by the quality of work submitted by others. I expected more rigor from folks that completed the previous courses in the series.

I think that to reviewed by classmates is nbot the best way to get an education. Anyway - thank you

The peer review is not a good idea for this course. I expected to have valuable inputs from Wharton staff to my submission.

Was initially apprehensive about being able to complete the capstone project as the course outline was not specific about the contents and expectations. But I'm glad I did it! Overall, the capstone project was systematically presented. The only drawback is that the assignment in week 4 isn't really necessary as it's just a compilation of the previous weeks assignments and doesn't yield any additional learnings.

Before joining this course i was not aware the different methods, techniques and tools of data analytics. This course gave me an immense knowledge bank to understand, read and represent the data

I'm sorry, I have to rate this one section of the Business Analytics Specialization low because the peer review feels like a joke. The content itself is fine but around half of the assigned peer-review is from years ago so the review doesn't really matter. The other half is just people submitting no work and asking for a free pass. And there's a tiny percentage of people actually submitting work related to the course and that is not from years ago.

Compared to the other analytics courses this was pretty bad and I didnt really learn anything. The peer review assesment process to pass is a farce.

As others have said, the first four courses were good - I learned a lot from the videos and materials. However, the capstone project was a waste of time. Why a company failing in its industry was chosen as the focus is beyond me. In addition, the concepts learned in the previous four courses were only about 1/3 of the requirements of this capstone project - the problem statement and strategy portions could have been done without having taken the four previous courses at all. This seemed like a very generic project with almost no collaboration between the professors who taught the previous four courses. I expected a lot more from a Wharton-led course - very disappointing.