STAT 3250

This class is alright, but your grade doesn’t tend to reflect the work you put in. I’m not entirely sure the GPA counter is that accurate for this course as people I know are having a similar experience to mine. Holt is a nice guy but not the best teacher per se. Your grade is primarily composed of homework assignments but the grading is a bit off where TAs only grade about a 1/4th to 1/3rd of the questions and base your entire grade on those. It’s also weird because the questions being graded aren’t the same across the board (you get graded on hardest ones, friend gets graded on easiest ones). Tests in class weren’t necessarily hard but there wasn’t enough time to complete, let alone review. I’m not exaggerating when I say I went to Office Hours every week to get help/get answers check to ensure getting a good grade but still got points taken off even after having it looked at by TAs. OH are poorly managed in every aspect so don't expect a lot of help once the assignments get harder. I'll probably end up around a high B+ (normally I'd be thrilled) but I've put so much work in to just get that when it's really structural issues that inhibit my grade and not the material itself. If you need a stat elective, STAT 3080 is sooo much better structurally and if you want a good grade, at least that class will reward hard work you put into it. Not a hard class in terms of material, just annoying based off how it's structured. If you take this, become friends with the people in the class so you can at least have a buddy to check homework with.

Overall, not a bad class. I don't particularly recommend it if you already have experience using Python because the first few weeks will be pretty boring, but the classes usually end early and your grade is made up of weekly homework assignments and a couple open-note, open-Internet exams which are not bad at all. My only issue with the class was the extremely arbitrary grading system. The homeworks were 15-20 questions but only 4 were actually graded and the points deducted were inconsistent and again, arbitrary, but this was probably more the TAs because Professor Holt would just recommend you appeal your grade. Professor Holt is awesome though and did a great job given the circumstances, so if you're willing to make sure you write the code exactly as they want it, it's a pretty easy class

Great class. Like others have said, you are kind of at the mercy of the TA grading your homework. I ended up going to office hours a lot so that my code was more or less exactly the solution they were looking for. It's also very helpful to connect with classmates so that you can collaborate on the homework. Don't wait until the last minute to get started on the homework. There's usually a few problems that require some serious time and thinking.

I have mixed feeling about this class. On one hand, Holt's a nice guy, and the class is useful if you want to do statistics with Python. However, there are also quite a few downsides to this class:

1) Grading. A 95.2% is an A in the class, which I think should be illegal. 13 assignments make up your entire grade, each worth 50 points. He doesn't drop any, but makes your lowest grade have half of the weight, so there's 625 total points.

2) Assignments. The wording on some of the problems were vague, to say the least. People kept on badgering him with questions about what he wants from us, and there were many games of mental tug-of-war over whether or not to include/not include some data in the problem, how we should present our solutions, etc. Luckily, collaboration was encouraged, so we could argue all we wanted in our GroupMe (trust me, we did).

3) He was pretty slow with releasing assignment grades, not too slow, just could've been faster.

I recommend taking this class, but getting a friend to collaborate with. Shouldn't be too hard if you have Python experience (I came in having taken CS 1110), he covers the basics for the first week, then goes into numpy and Pandas, and the last week was the god-awful dask package.

#tCFspring2021

I would honestly recommend taking this class if you have to for the Stat major. You don't have a final exam or project, so the class grade is entirely composed of weekly assignments graded by the grade scope "autograder." They are pretty long and time consuming, but some are harder than others and you are allowed to collaborate with others as long as you're not directly copying code. I would HIGHLY recommend taking with a friend/collaborating on assignments or going to office hours, because if you check answers w others and/or go to office hours with a TA on questions you're stuck on it isn't super hard to do well.

When I took this course, your entire grade was composed of 13 weekly homework assignments you had to turn in (literally nothing else-- no exams or anything like that). The entire course is done in python, so it certainly helps if you have taken CS 1110 or have any other coding experience-- however this isn't necessarily required to do well. Overall, the course is focused on various methods to extract data from large data sets (our final assignment used a data set with over a million observations). The homeworks vary in difficulty, but took me on average about 5-6 hours a week to complete. The best advice I could give for this course is to find a study partner/ group that you can work on homeworks with/ compare answers with because sometimes the questions are a bit unclear as to what output it's asking for and it's fairly easy to make simple mistakes. The homeworks were accompanied by video lectures (usually 30-40 mins in total) that were sometimes helpful, though a lot of the material seemed to repeat itself after the 3rd or 4th week. The only slight issue with this course was the grading scale which is point based, but translated into needing a 95.2% overall to get an A which is a bit high. However, if you start the homeworks early enough and are able to attend office hours and compare answers with a group, you should be fine in this class. Also, this course is helpful for simply giving you the basic tools in order to actually perform data manipulation in python. If you are a stats major I would certainly reccomend this course-- plus Jeff Holt is a great guy who is very approachable.

#tCFspring2021

I took this class over the summer because it filled up so quickly in the spring. Holt was a nice guy and a decent professor. Always willing to answer questions. The format of the class was to watch a few short lecture videos for homework and then come to class and work on the assignments. There were 12 assignments total and you were allowed to work in groups. The class was not too hard, but I had previous Python experience.

This class is very easy if you are familiar with Python at all. It is also a reverse classroom so you do your weekly homeworks and ask the TAs/professor questions. Attendance is not required and most people don't show up to class at all. No midterms or projects, just 13 weekly assignments throughout the semester. #tCFF23

I found this class to be super practical and relatively low stress. Classes are optional office hours and content is learned from online videos posted. Your grade is completely based on 13 assignments (one each week) that are fully autograder based. My biggest tip for this class would be to find a friend who is good at coding so you can check answers on the questions where the autograder tests are hidden. Holt was approachable and kind when answering questions, though sometimes wouldn’t give a straightforward answer on whether something was correct which was frustrating. Overall, while the assignments sometimes took up a bit of time, they weren’t too bad considering that being in class was optional and office hours were an options if I was feeling stuck. Also, it doesn’t matter much which professor you take it with, as you can attend either professors office hours and assignments are the same.