I thought this class was a continuation of the first course, but realized there was really no continuity between the two. The instructor should have explained more in depth especially when using shortcuts in Mode Analytics. I did not always understood what was happening and needed extra help. This course could be fined tuned a bit more.

First week was hard to follow. I felt very discourage to continue that it took me almost a week to return and do the rest of the course. It got better the next weeks. However, I think that strategies and pedagogical teaching can be improved. What I really like is when Katrina coded on lectures, it was cool to see her thinking process.

The instructions were frequently not clear. I often took her literally, which was not correct. Sometimes she didn't specifically state something she expected us to do. Other times, she stated it differently than what she really meant. It was a struggle. But I'm glad I gained more knowledge and practice writing queries.

The data set used in course is incoherent. There was issues deciphering the tables, column names, field names etc. Instructions were ambiguous at times making it even more cumbersome to deal with the exercises given as part of the course. Answers to the questions given as part of the final project need a review.

The course structure is well designed to achieve the course objectives. I appreciate that the course addresses the real-world example and we can do practical exercises. However, exercise questions are not enough or well worded to understand what the instructor intends to ask. It could be a negative point.

It's a little bit disappointing that even when classes are recorded, Kat's mistakes haven't been edited and in a couple of times, in the middle of her struggling with some issue with Mode, the record were suddenly interrupted and next the issue was 'magically' fixed (would've been helpful to know how!).

This course is nice, but there are many points that make tasks extremely frustrating: vague legend about an on-line shop, unclear tasks in the testing part, uncomfortable Mode Workspaces, which are obligatory to use, and no ER schemes (at the start you will have to guess which tables are connected).

The actual coding practice is a bit unstructured and not well explained. All the coding exercises could be easily skipped without even trying in the first place which is bad. This would be a great course if the coding practice were more strict with a definite code for a solution

This is a 3 star course as the concepts presented and the depth of the material covered was interesting. However, I am not sure that the way it was presented was optimal. More small and very focused exercises would have helped instead of large, sometimes hard to grasp exercices.

Some of the excercises are challenging but most of the times the instructions are not 100% clear. Also, despite statistics are not the core topic of the course, further explainations on ABTesting would be useful in order to make the process of answering meaningful.

It is an important course. However, the material of the course is not well explained. I struggled to understand what the instructor talked about. She speaks so fast and teaches inconsistently. It was boring and did not add much to me.

This was a very useful course. However, most of the videos lacked a context setting which made it a bit hard to follow. The slides could have been better too. But otherwise, the exercises were very helpful.

Suggestions for the Instructor - m​ake a separate video on how to use Mode analytics it will help the learners that includes how to build a report, you can remove the lock features on solutions video

I don't think it's a good course.

To be honest, the content is very good. However the relation of different datasets is very very very ambiguous , it's difficult to finish the case study.

The practice examples are not written well- it is hard to understand what is actually being asked. This was also true for the final peer-reviewed example.

The content is good, i appreciate that linking SQL with some data science subject such as AB test. that's the main reason for me taking this course.

It seemed a bit disjointed. The instructor seemed nervous. Some of the solutions to the exercises seemed overly complicated.

The project's instructions are not clear.

The lectures could be more detailed.

No good course

I definitely learned a lot during this course. I gave a 2 star rating because there are a number of issues/loss of time while taking this course

1 Practice sessions:

- Questions are often unclear, not guiding you to what you actually need to get to.

- Answers as given as a video. It's good to get a couple explanation about some steps, but often the code shown is incorrect, and the teacher spends minutes trying to correct it. Also, THE ANSWER SCRIPT IS NOT GIVEN. So you have to waste your time copying every line to test out their script! Very inefficient

- You have to add a comment to the practice exercise to move on to the next step. All these responses (thousands of them, random word/comment to move on) will show up in the forum discussion when you try to find an answer to some of your questions . The coursera search engine is pretty inefficient. So combined with these tens of thousands of unuseful comments, it's impossible to find the answer to any question.

- I looks like the instructors are not very active. I encountered a lot of posts in the forum that had no answers. And given the low number of people currently doing this course, it's unlikely that you'll get an answer to your posts.

2. Final assignment:

- Low traffic on course: There's no peer assignment to review. And no one to review yours.

- Exam questions are often unclear. So the least would be to clearly state what you'll be graded on, rather than finding this out when you submit your assignment

- Often refers to a script made sometime during the course. Very hard to find which script they are actually talking about, so you have to go on a scavenger hunt every time. That's also the case in practice questions

Kat, thanks for the course. I'm sure you put a lot of efforts in creating this course and content, but in order to turn this into a great course, you need to have people test it and use the feedback to improve it.

It's a shame that the instructors to this course will probably never read these comments, so this course will stay as a draft course forever. I don't know much about UC Davis, but with a course like this, I'm unlikely to recommend a UC Davis Course or a UC Davis degree to anyone.

This course is not nearly as good (or even "good") as the first course of this specialization. Concepts are taught too vaguely and the material is scattered in an order which doesn't make sense. It would have been helpful to know from the _beginning_ the tricks for coding in Mode, such as selecting multiple lines to comment out...instead, those tips were placed in the middle of the entire course as an aside. I wasted so much time looking up how to multi-line comment-out (couldn't find an answer) and ended up doing it the long way until that point of the course...when she could have mentioned it _from the very beginning_!

The idea of do-it-yourself exercises and answers-video was nice, but the instructor was not helpful during these videos. She mumbled a lot through her actions, so it was like a puzzle trying to figure out the rationale and intention behind her decisions. Lots of vague language...I get that sometimes things can be vague because this course can't cover every scenario, but I could find better explanations elsewhere online.

I spent more time looking up outside resources for things like pivot tables and windowing functions (not taught in the previous course) than learning it on Coursera. I'm left feeling like I spent money to teach myself these things, and could have saved the money I spent on this course.

All-in-all, I couldn't finish the course. I spent about 16 hours trying to perform the 5 steps to complete the final project for A/B testing the given dataset, and I wasn't even able to recreate the table she wanted to start the thing off.

This feels so bad. I hardly ever give up on something, but because there's no instructor feedback and almost no feedback from other students, there's just no way I can get through this. What a disappointing experience.

Most of the negative reviews for this course are accurate in my opinion. After reading the reviews, I decided to give the course a try anyway and I'm pretty disappointed that I invested as mush time in it as I did. The hands on exercises from the first week were beneficial and helped reinforce the learning from the first course in the specialization. Beyond that, I would say that the course seemed to lack an effective plan aimed at developing students SQL skills. It was apparent that the instructor is both knowledgeable and competent in SQL, however that knowledge and competency didn't translate into the ability to transfer knowledge to others via the course content.

I would of liked to have seen the presentations structured like those from the first course of the specialization. It would have been beneficial to have ER diagrams for the databases used in the hands on exercises. I can't say that the coding videos were much help, as there was little to no explanation as to what the instructor was doing and found myself struggling to stay awake while watching them. By the third week of the course, it seemed apparent that the specialization lacked an overall plan and the courses were created on an individual basis, rather than by a team working together to execute a well thought-out learning plan.

I wish I could give this course a better rating, but beyond the hands-on exercises from the first week, I wouldn't recommend the time investment to anyone, even those interested in pursuing the specialization.

While I appreciate the numerous practice exercises in this course, the experience overall was incredibly frustrating.

On the one hand, it's hard to check my practice queries against the instructor's recommendations when the solutions videos contain so many mistakes and so much typing. The instructions themselves were often confusing, and I wouldn't realize until watching the video that I had completely misunderstood large portions of the assignment. Because each query builds on the previous one, this meant going back and redoing the entire exercise.

On the other hand, I found several mistakes in the quizzes and support materials. It was easy enough to figure out what the answer was supposed to be, but this was still annoying for a paid course.

Most frustrating of all was the final project, however. The assignment itself was good, but having to submit it as a Mode report was incredibly confusing--it wasn't at all clear how I was supposed to show my work, and it would have been much easier to submit a text file with my code instead. After all, the peer reviewing students have access to the same databases and can quickly run my code to make sure it checks out.

Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, since I've taught data cleaning for Stata and therefore probably have higher standards than most students. But I can only imagine how lost most students are in this course, since it's only the second level in the SQL certificate, and I imagine most do not have a technical/coding background.