I have no idea why this class appears to be as highly regarded as it is. For the record, I got an A, and this is a terrible class.

The class is taught entirely by TAs and the professor, the director of the OMSA program, can’t be bothered to even show up for one class session. Most of the TAs provide good instruction but it’s hit or miss. Some are much better instructors than others. It’s tough luck if you get a TA with poor instructional skill because questions asked during the office hours are frequently met with “you can rewatch the video” or “you can ask that on Piazza”. Piazza is a whole other problem I’ll discuss later.

The video lectures are the primary way information is delivered and what will form the basis of the tests. Homework has nothing to do with the tests. The lectures are short and high level while the tests are detail oriented and confusingly worded. I feel sorry for anyone that doesn’t have a solid mastery of English. The class is also bizarrely organized. It starts with SVM then jumps around between supervised and unsupervised learning models. A cursory review of any intro textbook (and I have read several) will provide a logical flow of information. For example, SVM is always covered late in an intro book. This class should just use ISLR as a textbook, it’s right there.

The homework is time consuming and worth minimal to your grade. Most people seemed to spend their time learning how to code it than learning the underlying analytics techniques. Yes, a student is supposed to have “coding proficiency” for the program, but when OMSA routinely accepts people without such proficiency and tells them they can pick it up on the fly, they have implicitly altered the requirements of the program. This affects the peer review grading, which is a terrible and idiotic method of grading in grad school. For example, I had issues with RStudio crashing and was unable to complete one assignment. I went ahead and turned in what I had. I got 100 on it because two peers graded it 100 without any commentary. Another assignment received 90 as the final grade, but one peer graded it 75 because “I was interested in more explanation about the data” (which was the entirety of the comment). The data in question was “from your personal or work experience, what kinds of data might be used on a classification model?”, the HW had three more parts and no “explanation” of the data was asked for in the HW.

The point of all that, is that your HW grade will be a complete crap shoot with minimal to no reason as to why. You certainly will not receive any response that will be educational. Given that HW is also worth so low in the final grade, it’s best just to learn how to make the report look pretty and turn in the bare minimum. That will get you 90 to 100 almost every time even if you’re completely wrong. It’s much more worthwhile to spend your time understanding the lecture material in this class than doing HW.

Piazza is a terrible forum system and I have no idea why it’s being used by GT at all. There’s so many people in the class that it’s just flooded with thousands of posts. Everything from relevant questions to people that didn’t read the syllabus to questions out of left field. It was just too much to wade through.

The class is a fairly easy A, just focus on the lectures, Like really understanding them, and make your HW look prettty. The you’re all good.