STA T3026

weekly problem sets were fairly lengthy; take home midterm and final

Weekly psets begin easy but get insanely hard at the end especially when things get extremely confusing. Exams are for the most part manageable but difficult to study for. Curves to around B+ but don't quote me on that.

Honestly, a terrible professor. He is very unprepared for class every day. I took an 8:40 class that was required for my major, and I feel that he intentionally chose 8AM office hours in the hopes that no one would show up, though of course it is possible that he needed to get to his job right afterward. (But if that is the case, should he really be teaching a course when he can't even provide students with time to ask questions?) He cancelled class a few times due to the snow when I took his course. He also said he would email feedback for the midterm, and never did. My friend and I basically self-learned everything for the class. It seems as though he looked for slides and problem sets online. I found different slides from various sources, so he clearly just found them online and didn't make them. I felt like the problem sets were often unaligned with what he was 'teaching' in class. Don't take if possible.

A fairly strange class. The stats department combined 4026 and 3026 together, so that meant graduate students in the class, that generally made the curve worse during exams. There were a decent amount of graduate students, around 60 - 65% I'm guessing. One midterm, and one final, with problem sets due every week. One of the biggest flaws in this class was that there was no standard syllabus. Stodden basically taught whatever she saw fit and while it was interesting at times, it was often just watching her plug in R code and following her methods vaguely. I would have liked to see a bit more theory in this class, perhaps adding a lab session run by TA's would have helped. Many of the topics were glossed over too quickly and that just made things confusing for everyone. The problem sets were even more confusing, especially towards the end of the semester. Using R code to generate KML for Google Maps doesn't seem that useful to me, but tha's just my opinion. The exams were very hit or miss, Stodden would supply R code and we would write what it does or where the errors were. There wasn't really a way to study for this exam and going through old p-sets wasn't that useful either in the long run. Overall, this class suffered from lack of organization and this was evident in the psets and the exams. If you want to learn data mining, I'd suggest taking a higher level class with some t…

I mean, I guess kind of light. But I spent more time trying to decode his gibberish instructions on the assignments/exams than actually learning/doing the work, so don't view "light" as a positive aspect of the class. God this class was absolutely miserable.

Mixed. One homework a week, a midterm, and a final. The homeworks can take a long time. This isn't because they're challenging you to think or teasing you into mistakes that you learn from. They're designed to be constructive, in that they basically provide pseudocode for you to fill in with important steps. But after the first three or four assignments the sections became increasingly arbitrary and the projects became increasingly unrelated to the material taught in class.

Birol Emir absolutely should not be a professor. After four years of undergraduate classes and one year of graduate school, I can say with confidence that he is the most incompetent professor I have ever had. This is not hyperbole. He fails to be an effective instructor in every way imaginable: - Lecturing: Birol Emir does not know how to teach the material. His Powerpoint slide decks were literally just images of blocks of text copied and pasted from our textbook. Or sometimes, the slides would be taken directly from a company presentation with no alteration whatsoever. (He works at Pfizer. Slides would have the Pfizer logo in the bottom corner.) It was obvious that he did not prepare for the lecture in advance; he would go to a next slide, take a second to read the block of text, then summarize it ineffectively, or just read part of it out loud. Sometimes he would walk through an R program; but instead of doing a full demo, which would have been very helpful, he would just point to different R functions in the program and say completely unhelpful statements like, "this function does this, and that's good because we want it to do this... check out the manual on this library for more information." He would not go into any depth on any particular item or topic. Instead he would just mention something, and then move onto the next topic. I would leave every class feeling like I d…

The class started off okay but deteriorated really fast right around the midterm, which didn't test us on most of the concepts we learned (except for one question with a subjective answer that was graded harshly) and did test us on a lot of random unimportant things. The lecture notes are incredibly vague. Professor Stodden herself is a wizard at over-complicating simple concepts. I and fellow students were confused by intro-level material in subjects we already knew. Time in lecture is well-spent by starting on the homework assignments. Course material is a weak introduction to a disjointed set of computing skills that tangentially relate to data mining. In general, the content would be better suited as a lab section or tutorial series to supplement another course. The only thing I got out of this class is better R programming skills, which apparently I could have picked up just as easily in the non-applied Data Mining course or Intro to Data Science.

Four problem sets throughout the semester, one take home midterm, one pretty big final project.

The worst, most disorganized class experience I have ever had. He never gave us a syllabus at the beginning of the semester. A syllabus should include: office hours; grade breakdown (how much of your grade will be based on tests and assignments); when the midterm is; when all assignments are due; etc. His syllabus merely had a list of chapters from the textbook that we would be studying and none of the essential items mentioned above. As a result, I have no idea what my grade will be, since I don't know how much of it will be based on assignments and how much of it will be based on exams. The assignments were vague and expectations were never clear. When we would have assignments was also very unpredictable, there was no regular due date and he would often spring them on us a week before they were due, so it was very difficult to budget my time while taking this class. Most professors usually have a regular due date every week for problem sets (psets are due on every Thursday at 5pm, for example) or else the syllabus would include when they were due, but Birol did not do this. The midterm was a complete disaster. He did not tell us when the midterm would be at the beginning of the semester; we found out that the midterm would be on the day of the withdrawal deadline about three weeks before the midterm, so there was no way to withdraw from the class if you did poorly on the mi…