STAT 3280

Really tedious class. Lecture is super boring, he just goes over code for an hour and fifteen minutes. The homeworks are incredibly tedious and long. Really difficult class if you have no R experience, and even if you do it's still really tedious confusing.

Absolutely horrible. This class is so bad that in a class of 60 people, only 10 people show up on a good day (this was before the school closed). The professor has very poor content delivery, lacks motivation to effectively teach any materials (which shows by his attitude while teaching), and throws you with at least 3 thousand lines of code to essentially go over by yourself for each R file, quite literally, and there are at least 2 of them that are like that so far. The class itself has 4 homework total that account for 100% of your grade. It may sound easy, but it is not. The instructions are very vague and need quite a bit of clarifications, which he won't tell you unless you ask him explicitly. There are no means of effectively communicate with him; he is not very approachable outside of class. Continuing with the homework, the grading is very harsh. 90% is an A in the class, but you'll get a point off, which is 1% of your grade, if you put too many words in your submission, even when the question asks to analyze the output. If you account for that and put fewer amount of words, then he will take a point off for not explaining in detail. The professor for this class expects you to do graduate level of work and makes the homework to be at that level. If you want to learn about databases, do not take this class, This class will learn about data visualization for 75% of the class, from HW 1 to HW 3, and touch on DB after that. Overall, I do not recommend this class to anyone, even the CS majors should avoid this class.

This class was worthless, I learned absolutely nothing. The homeworks are unnecessarily hard to do and are your entire grade. Prof Li seems nice but just is not engaging or an effective teacher. Lectures were basically him just running through hundreds of lines of code (that were pretty difficult to decipher and had little commenting). Would not recommend at all, really the stat department should do something about this class because it has no positives.

An easy, but worthless class, depending on your background. I'm a CS + STAT double major and didn't learn anything new in this class. I was able to do the first three homework assignments without paying attention in lecture or looking at any lecture slides, though your results may vary depending on your programming background. I was on pace to get a high A (A+ range) but decided to take CR/NC in all of my classes (Covid 19) and thus had no incentive to do the last homework (or watch any lecture videos for the last two months of the course, lol). As some other reviews have touched on, the lecture style is ridiculous. Showing off thousands of lines of code isn't the way to teach programming. What's important is learning the fundamentals and way of thinking about problems because you can always google for code samples and refer to stackoverflow + documentation when you're actually programming. Instead of teaching how to think about data visualization problems, the professor just showed us how to do a bunch of them in R, which is useless because, once again, you can always refer to online documentation to do this. I can't comment on his effectiveness for the database portion because I didn't watch any of the lectures or do the homework - I had a gut feeling that it would be bad and that I'd be better off taking the databases course in the CS department.

if you are taking this course, you dont really need to attend class to complete the homeworks. Downloading his sample code and googling code was the key to finishing these assignments. It personally freed up my schedule for me. However, what I (and many others) didn't like was the harsh grading on the assignments. He had a grader for this course who seems to deduct points over the smallest reasons.
But like others have side, it was really boring course and it was SO hard to find motivation to complete the last two homeworks at home. He covered relational databases for 1.5 weeks and honestly I learned something new in that unit but the lecture was soooooo boring.

This class is terrible. I'm a STAT major who looooves creating visualizations and I could not find an ounce of motivation to do anything in this class. The lectures are beyond boring, just listening to the professor talk through thousands of lines of code for 75 minutes, to the point that the 60 person class dwindled down to <15 people in the lecture before spring break. If you want to take an interesting visualization class, I recommend SARC 5400 or just learning it on your own. The entire grade is based on 4 homework assignments that are graded pretty hard and it's basically assumed you know how to use R pretty well in order to reformat the ridiculous datasets you're given. I really don't recommend this course unless it's the only elective available and you have no other choice. Waste of time

This class was really boring. It was asynchronous for this semester, and I never watched an entire lecture. I had heard he just goes over R script for the entire lectures, and from the snippets I caught, that couldn't have been more accurate. I literally downloaded the R script onto my computer and ran it line-by-line, to see what the code does, in like 5 minutes, so the lectures were useless.

The class was comprised of 5 assignments, and were worth 15-25% of your semester grade each, and you can work in groups of up to 3. The problems in the assignments would vary in difficulty, with some taking literally 2 seconds, while others cost my group entire weekends. He intentionally provided open-ended questions, and I agree with his reasoning for it, but what I didn't agree with was him not providing clear enough instructions on what he was expecting for full credit, so we were taking shots in the dark for a not insignificant portion of our semester grade. In addition, we simply received our grade for the entire assignment, and had to go the extra distance to figure out why we missed the points we did.

This class wasn't hard, however, if you know R (like if you've taken STAT 3080 or STAT 1601). He provided numerous extra credit opportunities, and he made a 90 an A (not an A-, which is an 85), so overall this class wasn't enjoyable. It's an easy A if you need a stats elective to take.

#tCFspring2021