Algorithms in lectures were useless to programming assignment

The fact that test cases are not available is extremely frustrating and time consuming. I absolutely disagree with the instructors about the reason why test cases are hidden.

Michael Levin

Hi,

Learning new complex things is time consuming, it is essential, and it is ok. Without this time spent you wouldn't have learned even half of what you've learned while trying to find your mistakes yourself. Also, the testing techniques presented here are indispensable in the real life, and many learners of the Algorithmic Toolbox course have already confirmed this

Hello Mr. Levin,

First please forgive me for communicating with you in this place. I am not sure if there is a direct way to answer you, but I believe you will have access to my response.

I entirely agree with what you said that this needs time and I do not mind spending time learning new things. That is why I am here in the first place. But I think that hiding the test sets misplaces the balance where this time is being spend.

Let me give you an example: week 3 – hash chains - assignment no. 2. I wrote the app, submitted this and it failed on test no. 5. Having generated tons of test cases I was nowhere closer as all looked good, but still failed your engine. As it turned out the problem was not with the algorithm implemented but with the presentation layer. ‘Check x’ command when x is not found in the hash table should return blank line and my program returned nothing. I could not find this in the specification hence lots of hours trying to figure out the solution.

It was not a bug with the program, it was the problem how the data is presented. I do not mind spending time developing solutions to the assignments. I would love if there were more advanced (even optional) problems to solve but I want to spend this time on the algorithm and solving the task rather than trying to figure out how to display the data.

Please, do not get me wrong, I absolutely adore the course, lectures are brilliant and my opinion should be regarded as a constructive criticism even if you do not agree with me. Thank you again for what you are doing.

Regards,

Marcin

I found the course a little tough, but it's worth the effort. It takes more time than mentioned. Apart from that, it is actually good and covers most of the topics required for interviews.

Lots of fun problems to solve. To get the most of this course, solve every single problem. Good content, not enough sample problem on tree.

Excellent course. Great coverage of data structures. Good practice questions and explanatory videos.

Good Course for Knowledge

Great course

It was difficult in using of pseudocode in my code

I liked this course alot.

If you are a student and come from the previous course, you may only read the cons, since this course has the same spirit as the previous.

Pros:

1. The lectures contain quite a good material which is somehow difficult and they made me to pay attention. The lectures are based on dasgupta's book and MIT course book.

2. There are links to additional materials, I found the dijkstra's book and MIT course book, so I was able to gain extra information for topics which interested me.

Also slides are very useful

3. The forum! This course has a life forum where you can find help or share your ideas.

4. The teaching stuff! They are answering student questions and taking part in discussions

Cons:

Having compared this course with the previous one from the set, this course suffers from luck of interesting problems. The previous course has more than ~25 problems and for each module it has advanced problems,even more they added extra problems during the course running.

This course has ~12 problems and only one advanced for the whole course!. Only this advanced problem made me take a piece of paper and a pen and draw trees, and play with toy examples. Only for this problem I wrote a stress test. That is the most fun for me of studying!

If this course didn't have this advanced problem, I would barely give it 3 stars.

P.S.

Theaching stuff, please conider to add extra problems, the first course is awesome and it is way too good. This course is good, but it think you may develop it not only the first one. Otherwise students may get dissapointed if they come from the previous course.

I hoped that you would have added extra problems, so I slowed down, my expectation didnt come true :(

All in all a great and challenging course. A big thank you to all the teachers! I especially liked the assignments as completing them forced me to think about all the little details and edge cases.

A few observations/constructive criticisms:

- While the first 3 weeks had almost everything explained rigorously, including complete, usable pseudo codes, the last 2 weeks had lots of holes in terms of details. I think it is down to the fact that it covered a lot, however, pseudo codes suddenly became very high level, to the point where a 5 liner translated to ~100 lines of real code. This in terms meant that learners had to do quite a bit of additional research about the nitty-gritty. Nevertheless I thoroughly enjoyed this extra research, just be mindful about the extra time required.

- There are languages with first class support, namely C++, Java and Python3, which means there are starter files supplied. If you choose a different, supported language then be prepared that you have to implement everything from scratch, which again mean extra time, although I would argue that you will learn more, especially in the last 2 weeks.

- Forums seemed to be more active in the past, especially with regards to teacher contribution. Be prepared to be self-reliant and able to come up with answers to your own questions.

I found the assignments challenging in the absolute best sense of the term, and therefore incredibly rewarding as well! Whenever I've gotten stuck, the answer was always in the course material somewhere, even if I didn't see it there at first. The discussion forums were extremely helpful, and I was astounded to see that that instructors were still actively monitoring the discussion forums and responding to student questions. I'm obviously not an expert in this field, but I've been an educator before, and my own impression of the assignments was that they were extremely well designed: it was impossible to pass them without knowing what you were doing, the tools to approach them were always found in the lectures, and the challenge problems pushed your knowledge even farther. I would recommend the specialization to everyone. Additionally, I noticed that the content aligns well with other DS&A syllabi I have seen in brick-and-mortar institutions, especially the first 3 or 4 courses. It's also a very nice luxury to be able to submit in Python. I have certainly learned a great deal.

I always wanted to improve the algorithms and data structures field. The books wasn't so efficient. Especially they weren't so practical. These courses are the first courses where I really got a lot of knowledge. Especially because of assignments. All lectors are very good in explanation of the material and tell many additional useful things. These courses are the really good base, after which you can open the books related to algorithms and read more details if you needed.

I am definitely going to complete the whole specialization!

The only thing which was not convenient for me is that both courses Algorithmic Toolbox and Data Structures are started at the same time. It was difficult to find out the time for both courses and spend enough time to solve all assignments instead of only enough for passing.

Anyway, now I am started the second iteration of the course and I am going to solve all assignments which I skipped.

Big thanks to Daniel, Alex, Pavel, Neil and Mike!

Regards,

Sergey

Congratulations for this second course of the "Data Structures and Algorithms Specialization". This was again well-designed, informative, and most importantly an extremely educative course. Yes, it is demanding and some times requires significant effort and time for someone to pass the programming assignments. But there is "no free lunch"! Making easy to pass the tests or providing all the test cases may help more people to earn this certification, but the added value of a course that can really learn you how to design better algorithms will be missing. On the downside, I would ask from the instructors to further elaborate on some week lectures (modules), especially if the topic is going to be discussed in the corresponding programming assignments. The problem with the splay trees is probably characteristic. Overall, well done! Many thanks for the quality of the course you provide! Keep up the good work!

Great continuation of the Algorithmic toolbox course. There's a lot of new, interesting material here. The videos are very good, the slides are of high quality, and you will also find some good references to online university materials and interactive visualizations.

The homeworks are challenging but enjoyable, and you will also find some really challenging optional assignments here.

The only downside of the course is that unless your friends are computer scientists, you're going to lose them if you talk too much to them about AVL trees, distributed hash tables and splay trees! ☺

Even some programmers/coders scoff at these things, but as a programmer I'm certain that you will become a better at your job if you learn these.

Can't wait to start the next course in the specialization!

A really great course that deliver exactly its promises : a college-grade algorithmic course.

If you are looking to know all about classical data structures (arrays, lists, trees, heaps, ...) used in every program, this is the course for you. And if you are not interested in those topics ... well, you should !

Or course, this is a challenging course by it abstract nature. But with some work, the support of the instructors and of your peers, you will overcome the difficulties. After that with your newly gained knowledge, you will be able to choose the right data structure for your needs or implement it efficiently in the language of your choice.

Worth mentioning the course is language-agnostic -- and the assignment may be submitted in C, C++, Java or Python.

this is my second course that I have taken. I learned many things this course is more difficult than algorithmic toolbox but when you work hard you can finish all units

in the beginning i thought that i would not be able to continue because i dont have a lot of knowledge in c+, java or python, but i decided to learn c+ sonce the first course. these coursed were very difficult but i could finish then and this is all because of the professors whom were excellent and the challenging homework.

Thanks to everyone that has dedicated there time and resources to mke this wonderful course, I appreciate it a lot

I really enjoyed learning stacks, queues, hash, heap, trees etc in this course. the videos and slides are very practical and informative with large no. of figures which really helped me in understanding how a particular algorithm is working and how it is efficient. every quiz contains very good conceptual questions related to a particular topic. some of them are tricky . each question has its own flavor and it really helped me to clear my doubts. Completing an assignment is really a challenge and i felt good each time when i passed a particular assignment.

Really good course to understand implementation details and analysis of the most used data structures, both basic and advanced. The explanations are awesome accompanied by challenging problems to solidify your knowledge. I'd definitely recommend this course to anybody who's looking to improve their problem-solving skills, getting ready for coding interview or just want clear explanations of some of the core data structures concepts in computer science. I really enjoyed this course, thank you everybody for putting it all together!

This course gives you real world examples of the data structures that you are going to learn and implement and and this really helps in answering the basic question "Why am I doing for what am I doing?". The programming questions are challenging and solving it actually helps you understand every aspect of the data structure that you are applying to the question.

Overall this course has improved my understanding of data structures and also where to apply it.Wonderful work by the instructors!

Recently the instructors updated the course and implemented a solution to all my past complains.

In my opinion the team is really taking the quality serious.

However I just want to mention, that there are regular session for each course so that everybody can avoid having two overlapping courses in this specialization at the same time.

I did not know that and worked on two courses at the same time, until the instructor informed me about the short interval between sessions of a given course.

Thanks for the great course! Giving it a five stars. Although, the programming assignment for the last week could be better. Instead of implementing the same in-order tree-traversing three times with minor variations (first time as requested, second time to test if a given tree is a BST, and a "hard BST" variance), would be better to include tasks on implementing balancing and splaying a tree.

Great course! As soon as you'll understand how the splay tree works and use a hint from the assignment, the rope problem (the best so far) will no longer be a problem. The course could have been improved though by giving a brief overview of B-trees and Red-Black trees. Anyways, thanks to all the instructors for their hard work and good luck to the all the learners!

This course helps me fully understand how hash is implemented in most programming languages. How to build something like dropbox.... The Rope data structure is the most challenge I've met for a long time. Many thanks to creators help me get a chance to understand Rope data structure, then I can understand what Xi- text editor platform that Google is writing about.

A) An eye opener course in my regards which is really well curated and organized.

B) I had gone had to learn a good deal of knowledge and software wisdom from this course that I highly RECOMMEND this to others.

C) Enroll into it and try to finish the assignments on time and I am sure you will end up seeing the results yourself...

" Well Done San Diego team"

Great course - the homework problems were really helpful for cementing concepts. However, I did feel that the difficulty of the homework problems did not increase with the progress of the course. I think that it would have been very reasonable to increase the difficulty of the homework assignments as the course progressed. Otherwise, great overall course.