Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class

http://pastebin.com/JiczaBxb

by mlacitation • 15 years ago

201 111 15 years ago

pastebin.com

rfrey• 15 years ago

Sadly, I'm not expecting any such letter from Ng's ML class, because I'll bet there's 10k people tied for top marks.

That's at least partly due to an extremely effective teaching system and style, so I'd say it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

ccarpenterg• 15 years ago

Yes. The online ML class method is extremely effective and efficient too. After two months I'm able to apply ML to the most common problems without any previous background on the topic.

joshz2• 15 years ago

I don't know the numbers for the ML class and the format is a bit different, however, for DB class from the many people that were signed up only 9180 took the midterm[1] and (only 908 got scores >= 18/20) <- That is wrong, final had 20 questions, midterm had 18. So that's 908 people who scored 18, 2082 with 17 or over and 3428 with 16 or over.

So if ML numbers are in any way similar to this maybe it wouldn't be so bad. That is if there was such a letter.

I'll add that Professor Widom's style is quite engaging as well.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLtUKf4Y99w#t=2m09s

brg3• 15 years ago

The db midterm had a max score of 18, not 20. But I agree with the intentions of your post.

nosignal3• 15 years ago

I wonder about this. Apparently the letter we get at the end contains our ranking. I wonder what the distribution of scores would be; I'd assume there would be a small fraction of enrolments actually doing the exercises, a big spike at 100%, and most falling in the range of 80-100%. Personally I forgot that I hadn't done a couple of the quizzes, so did them late, and didn't complete the optional part of the first week's programming assignment on time, so although I've probably got a "good mark" on paper, I'm probably nowhere near the top 10% of students.

rglullis2• 15 years ago

I have only the best possible things to say about the video lectures, but the lab assignments are just too easy. For something that is supposed to be the advanced track, I was hoping that they would do something more than "take this description of the function, implement it in Octave, make it pass our tests".

Of course, I know it's their first class and you can't get everything perfect right off the bat. But I'd love to see the lab assignments being one larger project, some kind of task where you need to apply the principles learned to solve different problems. It would be also more effective in measuring/grading students.

On an unrelated note: I wonder what is the license for the classes/videos. I am working now in an adaptive e-learning platform. It would be cool to put their videos and questions in our system and see how effective the system is.

jorgeortiz85• 15 years ago

I agree the programming assignments have been very easy.

However, I doubt they have the bandwidth to manually grade thousands of assignments. Given the scale of the class, the grading is forces to be automated. It's hard to come up with such assignments and even harder to make them challenging, given an automated grading script.

jbermudes2• 15 years ago

Unfortunately the "difficulty" of the ML class assignments was not in the material application of the things learned in the lecture but instead in the gotchas of Matlab/Octave vectorization. Most of the assignments were in the format of: "Here's a forumla that applies to the element, generalize it to the matrix so there's no for-loops." Which, while challenging for those not accustomed to thinking that way, was not a challenge of applying what one learned from the lectures.

The course was awesome for what it was: a chance for the average programmer to get their feet wet in ML, but the fact that it was hosted by Stanford seems to lead to a somewhat humorous irony that it was pretty accessible whereas Stanford's real-life rigor is supposed to be nothing of the sort.

lemonad• 15 years ago

It would be interesting to know what data they use for these kinds of assessments outside the given ones for the course, that is the best 6 homeworks out of 8 account for 30% of the grade, the midterm for 30% and the final exam for 40%.

rhygar• 15 years ago

A program like this is a great way to promote cheating.

tzs3• 15 years ago

Drat. If I'd known they were going to do that, I'd have made sure I was in the top 1000.

edit: why is this getting voted down? I would expect there are a fair number of people here who took the course with a casual approach, like I did. E.g., I usually watched the lectures early Sunday, then did the homework that night. Then, for those topics that I enjoyed and wanted in more depth, I read the sections in the book on them. This approach is relaxing and fun, but does increase the tendency to make silly mistakes and not catch them (which I in fact have done a few times now).

I am, it turns out, enjoying the material enough that I think I would like, if I ever find myself looking for a job, to find one where I can use this stuff.

Tichy2• 15 years ago

Is there any way to know how well you are doing (before the end of the course)? I thought I wasn't doing too badly, but with 100000 enrolled students there are bound to be lots who have 100% scores.

tzs3• 15 years ago

I don't think it is anywhere near 100k students. I can't find the cite, but I thought they commented somewhere that 20k or something like that people took the midterm.

I presume people are guessing how they are doing by just looking at their homework and midterm scores so far, weighted according to the appropriate weights.

prosody• 15 years ago

Maybe that is why they didn't say they were going to do this—the sort of person who goes all in even with nothing to gain is what they're looking for.

(Lest I seem overly harsh, I'm in the same boat.)

buff-a2• 15 years ago

My guess is that you are being modded down because your statement is of a form that many people have heard in real life and associate with poor performance. It shows a lack of thinking about jobs. However, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are young and not really worrying about such things.

Basically your answer is like the classic "I could have got a 5.0, but I partied", which is a statement that says a number of things. 1. "I think all the kids who got 5.0 are boring and don't party" (untrue). 2. "I am not capable of getting a 5.0 and partying" (probably true).

That the person would even make the statement says something about their general level of intelligence. Hence when you say "If I had but known, I would have been in the top 100", you are saying "I had no idea that a hugely publicized course at a renowned university might lead to job opportunities". This lack of intelligence seems to contradict your first statement. Or it could be that you are not in the habit of thinking about such things. I hope you are either a kid, or an incredibly wealthy trust-fund baby living in isolation. Usually, however, I hear such remarks from people who are not smart enough to realize they are not smart enough, or they are quitters, or they are victims.

tzs3• 15 years ago

Actually, the modding has reversed and my comment is now at +9.

The "partying" I was doing instead of putting a non-casual effort into the class was dealing with some projects at work, and starting to read a book on analytic number theory because I'm tired of being someone who doesn't understand the proof of the prime number theorem.

> you are saying "I had no idea that a hugely publicized course at a renowned university might lead to job opportunities"

Yeah, I did not think it would lead to much in the way of job opportunities. That's because the class is just an introduction. If you compare almost any section of the class to the corresponding section in the Russell and Norvig book, you'll see that they are leaving out a lot of detail in the class. The homework in the class almost never pushes any limits of what was done in the lectures. Many of the homework problems are just things that were done in lecture with the numbers changed.

I would have expected the job opportunities to start at a deeper level than the class reaches.

quasistar• 15 years ago

Not sure I agree with the correlation that the 'most talented engineers' are those that 'scored highest on the AI class HWs and Exams,' but I certainly wouldn't refuse any of the folks who were able to solve the ApproximateAgent PacMan Search problem in under 30 seconds from joining my team ;)

Its wonderful that Sebastian & Peter are reaching out like this after all they have done so far. Congrats to everyone that slugged it out, and good luck on the final this weekend!

Tichy2• 15 years ago

Which one was the PacMan question again (unit/homework number)?

bgutierrez• 15 years ago

There are probably a lot of talented engineers not in the top 1,000, but there are also a lot of non-talented engineers not in the top 1,000. I guess it's a reasonable cut-off. Thankfully it's not the only way to get into a great company.

WildUtah• 15 years ago

Well, I haven't received any such email and my score in the class is 98% so far (with only the final exam pending this week).

I expected that around 10,000 people would have a perfect score in the class given my experience with Asian participation in online programming contests. There are a few countries in that part of the world where organizing a group to check each others' work and ensuring perfect scores is common and encouraged even when the official requirement is to do your own work. And those happen to be countries filled with millions of smart people. India, China, and Russia seem to be the heart of the phenomenon. Google, Facebook, and Topcoder have systems to deal with it but ai-class.org does not.

Anyway I'm neither surprised nor disappointed not to be in the top sliver. I'm not hireable anyway. It's funny that there is an identifiable top 1,000 at all instead of 10k+ perfect scores.

learc836• 15 years ago

I got the letter, I made a 100% on everything except homework 6 and 7 (missed 1 each on those).

YokYok2• 15 years ago

I made only one mistake (98% in homework 6) and haven't got the letter.

ramkalari• 15 years ago

I'm not so sure about that given that I'm from one of the countries you've mentioned. My guess is that the profile of people who've taken part in ai class would be very different from what you would see in coding contest sites. Since no rewards were promised, I would think that those groups of people who would game the system to get perfect scores would be a very small number.

wingerlang• 15 years ago

Do you know how the systems work?

EdiX2• 15 years ago

> Google, Facebook, and Topcoder have systems to deal with it but ai-class.org does not.

How do you know this?

clavalle• 15 years ago

Likely they look at everything, not just the graded portions, to come up with that kind of split. So if you got 100% on every quiz the first time, every homework and test you'd be in that group. If you flubbed the quizzes here and there, probably not.

They will also probably look closely at that optional programming assignment as well.

I knew there was a reason Google let Peter Norvig take the time to do this ;)

brg3• 15 years ago

The optional programming assignment is a standard quiz. There is really not much to it, and can be gamed without writing a line of code.

dianaZ• 15 years ago

Is this for real? Can anyone verify that this letter was in fact sent out?

learc836• 15 years ago

Yes, I received one, and it's from the same stanford.edu email address that sent the letter congratulating people on perfect 100s after homework 4.

wesnerm2• 15 years ago

I got the letter. I received a 100% on the homeworks and 98% on the midterm.

brg3• 15 years ago

It seems that this was sent to students with 100% aggregate score up to this point (after dropping the bottom two quizes). One acquaintance had 1 wrong in aggregate and another had 0 wrong in aggregate but two imperfect quizes, and only the latter claims to have received the letter.

learc836• 15 years ago

From what I've seen I think they are taking all scores, I've heard from someone who got 6 100s and didn't get it, but he didn't attempt the last 2 quizes b/c he already had 6 100s.

I made 6 100's, a 98, and a 97, and a 100 on the midterm and I got it.

robryan3• 15 years ago

As someone doing the course i would say its a decent way to identify some candidates but it wont be a really high correlation. It depends a lot on the time you have to invest and how rigorously you go through your answers and study the material the questions are drawn from. Some programming challenges would be great to better separate whether people really understood the material despite being harder to mark.

Personally I've always got a bit wrong in most of he homeworks but usually felt that while I understood the material I didn't recite enough time to rigorously check my answers and rewatch the materials to pick up on some of the subtle things you need to remember or some questions.

learc836• 15 years ago

They are also looking for people to work with Professor Thrun's company. So maybe they are looking for people who are passionate about the class.

aerique• 15 years ago

I'm passionate about the class but I also have to juggle it with a new job and family life which made approaching the class casually the best option for me.

So their metric isn't ideal for identifying passionate poeple ;-)

tcarney• 15 years ago

They may be trying to collect resumes (and job placement performance) from the top 1000 students to see what the correlation is. If they can prove that correlation, then they could essentially run the courses as a recruiting tool for paying companies.

Homunculiheaded• 15 years ago

I took this course casually as well (wanted to fill in some gaps in my undergrad education). But my guess is that people that complete this course casual probably already have a lot on their plates. For me it was family, working, teaching and taking a grad class. I never double checked my hws, could only do a single pass through the lectures, and didn't spend any time checking for nuance in many of the Qs and my grade shows accordingly. However in the end I'm really excited that I was able to continue through it despite all this (I'm really curious to see the percentage of participants who saw the course through completion compared to those who signed up).

The correlation will be interesting. Undoubtedly the top 1000 is made of many of the type of people that must be the best at whatever they try (not exclusively of course) and with a decent amount of time on their hands, after all there is no disincentive whatsoever for not completing something and no previously known reward for perfection (I guess a piece of paper can count). Given some wording in some of the Qs (actually my only complaint about this course) a lot of care must be taken to ensure that every question is right, so being in the top 1000 is no small effort.

jeremyarussell• 15 years ago

Same here in regards to time, family, etc. I'm hoping they keep the videos up for some time after the last week, I missed a few during the more hectic times. Regardless I've learned tons that I'm already implementing in code (and daily life, like actual planning methods and such.)

That said I have a job I like already, and plan on using what I learned here.

Those 1000 with more time and drive to be the best probably are some of the best job candidates though. Plus chances are they do need a job after all.

LogicX• 15 years ago

Surprised no-one brought it up yet: What I'd like to know is if anyone involved with the class is getting a referral bonus for bringing candidates to companies...

Follow up is how we feel about that...

sbisker• 15 years ago

I'm not sure why there's a down-vote here, because that was exactly the question I had. There has been a system of professors referring their top students to their colleagues for years, and on a small scale I don't see much issue. However, with these large online classes, these professors can stand to be gatekeepers to an incredibly massive - and valuable - source of leads. It doesn't help when there is no true transparency to the process, and a desire for the school to recoup costs - we assume the professor would just send the top 1000 over regardless of source, but what's to stop them from only referring the names of students who, say, enroll for credit and pay the university? Or those who pay some sort of a separate "consideration fee"? I can't put my finger on why, but I'm a little unnerved by this...

HilbertSpace8• 15 years ago

Maybe, but be careful and think 'long shot':

I was one of three researchers in a team at Yorktown Heights that did some of the best research in AI in the world, published a string of peer-reviewed papers, was the source of two commercial products, gave a paper at the AAAI IAAI conference in Stanford with for that year the 25 best AI applications in the world, personally won an award, etc.

I've taught computer science at Georgetown University and Ohio State University. My Ph.D. is in applied math.

Once in my career, just as a 'scientific programmer', in two weeks I sent a few resume copies, went on seven interviews, and got five offers.

But after my Ph.D. and AI work, I sent over 1000 resumes to Google, Microsoft, GE, FedEx, and hundreds more, got only five interviews, and no offers. I got a nice letter back from Fisher Black (as in Black-Scholes) saying that he saw no applications of applied math or AI at GS.

I ask you: Who will hire you in AI and why?

In business, hiring is because some manager has some work to do and a budget to do it. That manager believes that they know nearly all that is needed to do the work and otherwise would not be betting his career on the work. Thus, the manager is not hiring high technical expertise he doesn't have. Instead the manager is, as on a factory floor 100 years ago, hiring labor to add 'muscle' to his work.

In particular, unless the manager knows AI, he won't be hiring for AI. And there is at most only a tiny chance that the manager knows AI and even less chance that his project will depend on AI.

Moreover, the manager does not want competition from below and does not want his project 'disrupted' from below so really doesn't want technical expertise above what is needed just to get his project done.

Net, if you know some AI and want to use it in business, then find an application and start your own business. Then, since you know AI, you won't have to hire anyone in AI either.

What I've said here for AI holds for essentially all advanced academic topics.

Sorry 'bout that.

anothermachine• 15 years ago

My (small) office has our first AI Ph.D starting next month.

You sound like a qualified candidate, if only you'd sent your resume our way.

Sorry 'bout that.

loboman3• 15 years ago

Yet there are AI applications coming from Google, Apple, Microsoft and many other companies (voice products, kinect, etc.), and service based companies that work on these advanced topics too like ITA used to be. Why do you think those companies weren't interested in you? or weren't you interested in the projects they had to offer? (I'm guessing it's the latter but I could be wrong)

Edit: for example some opportunities here http://www.kdnuggets.com/jobs/

HilbertSpace8• 15 years ago

I got no meaningful feedback on why I was not hired. The resumes led to only five interviews, and I'm counting phone interviews.

The main issues were (1) I am a US citizen and, thus, not on an H1B and (2) I was over 50.

Generally a subordinate is supposed to be younger.

codeonfire• 15 years ago

At big corporations you needs fame and "eminence" to land a job in a specialized field. You need to showboat and schmooze into these places. They want to hire the Sanjay Gupta of AI, writing code while also talking to refugees on CNN, or something. edit: tell me why you think I'm wrong if you think I'm wrong.

fuelfive• 15 years ago

We're hiring AI researchers!

http://vicariousinc.com/

brandonb• 15 years ago

AI is extremely useful for web companies since they collect terabytes of historical user behavior and want to make predictions about how users will behave in the future. In particular, machine learning is very widely used within Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. to do search ranking, anti-fraud, ad targeting, spam filtering, friend recommendations, you name it. Other AI sub-fields like planning are used in shipping and route optimization.

I'm at a 4-person startup and AI is the core of what we do. My e-mail is on my profile if you (or others) are interested.

patrickyeon2• 15 years ago

You were looking for someone to hire you to do AI work because you were great in AI. This reads more to me as using a student's performance in ai-class as a proxy for their overall software engineering performance. Seems like a better metric than many others that employers use.

HilbertSpace8• 15 years ago

I was just trying to get HIRED for anything, anything at all, not seriously illegal, immoral, or dangerous, and I would have compromised on those.

So, since this thread was about 'job placement' for students who did well in an AI class, I posted about my experience getting hired where part of my background was some expertise in AI.

Net, I have to conclude that, in getting a "job", expertise in AI will be from very rarely helpful to often a serious disqualification as in "It appears that you are overqualified for our position and would not be happy in it".

bradleyjoyce• 15 years ago

If you're looking for something, I'd love to chat with you about Socialyzer (http://socialyzerhq.com) I have contact info in my profile

HilbertSpace8• 15 years ago

Thanks for the leads, guys. Yes, that job hunting when I sent those 1000 resume copies was from 1995 to about 2005.

Finally I gave up on getting hired and decided to start a business.

I'm now deep into that effort and at least for now should continue it.

redcircle• 15 years ago

This type of thing wouldn't help you get a job with me. It could make a difference in getting an interview with me, if you had no real experience on your resume/CV. I want a well-balanced team player, that has a good chance to flourish on my team. Do course grades correlate with real-world flourishing on my team? Of course not.

ih• 15 years ago

Just want to mention that the start-up behind ai-class.com is looking for great engineers. If you're interested in education shoot me an email at ih@knowlabs.com.

sriram_sun2• 15 years ago

Getting new jobs is great. However, stay put in your jobs. Try to apply what you learned to little problems at work. Everyone has a huge database these days. I work for a medical device company and I write software that processes blood (embedded stuff). Every year, a million or so run logs find their way into one of our databases. There is a wealth of information there that we could figure out. Eg. How do me maximize yield, what's the best we can do with a certain type of donor. Do we perform worse on people in a certain geographic region etc. Eventually make useful predictions based on that data. Granted, that is not what I was hired to do, but I'm going to do it in my "free" time.

Why? Because it is interesting. Find something to apply to that might add value to the business. If a enough people do that, AI techniques might become common place. Get on Kaggle, GitHub your next project etc. Putting what we've learned to practical use is how we can proliferate and disseminate this knowledge. This was the intent of the class in the first place anyway.

tl;dr Using this course as a gateway to your next job is shortsighted IMO.

nosignal3• 15 years ago

I wish I could +1 this more than once. This is exactly the point, to me. There's not really such a thing as "an AI job". There is application of AI techniques to existing problems. Those problems are already found riddled throughout every job everyone's ever worked in.

You can't sit back and wait for AI to "happen". What would that even look like? The benefit of these techniques is in application to existing data; you don't have to quit and found some kind of computer vision/kinect/big data startup to take advantage of the knowledge.

You should be aiming to put yourself out of a job by using AI.

casualaistudent• 15 years ago

Why are they sending out this letter before the final?

plinkplonk2• 15 years ago

Prof Thrun mentioned in the last office hours that there were about 1650 people with "perfect scores" and he seemed a little thunderstruck by that and said he would admit these folks into Stanford if he could, because they are (paraphrasing, from memory)"Stanford quality".

What struck me was how much importance he gave to this metric, which isn't that hard to game on an online offering.

I know a few people (who shall remain nameless) who collaborate and check each others answers and so on before submission, in direct violation of the Stanford policy (and have 100s or close to it), and so probably have received this mail, whereas more "deserving" (note quotes) people who honestly work through the course material may not because they have, say, a 85% or 90% score.

That said, my key takeaway from this is that professors are very impressed by perfect scores irrespective of how you got them. There must be something magical about that row of 100s. Once you set up a grading/ranking system, it is psychologically very hard not to admire people who end up at the top.

I am personally a little dubious that the people with the highest scores would make the best pool of employees, especially given that this is an online course without the programming component, but what do I know?

I wrote Java code for most of the algorithms in AIMA as a side project a few years ago [1], and after I read an online post by Peter Norvig saying a few of his students had tried and failed a few times (to implement the code in Java- Common Lisp code existed and the Python version was in its infancy), I sent him the code and this became the "official" java distribution for AIMA ( though I don't maintain it anymore- the immensely talented Ciaran O'Reilly of the Stanford Research Institute does) and no one ever invited me to Stanford or offered me a cool AI job[2], sob! :-P.

No I am not bitter I tell you, not even the teeniest bit :-p [3]

I wonder how this signalling will play into the upcoming courses? If there are tangential real world benefits to be gained by attempting a "perfect" score, then you can expect a lot more game playing wrt scores and exams.

[1] More about how Peter Norvig shredded my initial code etc here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405277

[2] though eventually, after a lot more work, it did lead to my working on good ML/robotics etc projects from Bangalore, which is a hard thing to do in the Great Outsourcing Wasteland.

[3] I am really not bitter.

I wrote the code for the hell of it, not to get a job. AIMA was my introduction to the fascinating field of AI. It is a great, great book and it has a lot more material than is covered in the course.

I once did want to go to Stanford and learn from the great profs there, but now in a "mountain comes to Mohammed" fashion, Stanford is coming to me. I don't care about the credentialling - I just want to learn. I took the AI online course and enjoyed Peter's and Sebastian's teaching immensely. Fwiw I should have a high 90's score, (I didn't add it all up) but nowhere near a perfect score.

danielharan• 15 years ago

Especially considering how many of those questions ask you to guess. These people either already knew the material, cheated or were really effing lucky.

The work you did strikes me as a far better measure of character and subject understanding.

jbermudes2• 15 years ago

While I agree with your general sentiment, note that at least in ML-class, you can resubmit quizzes as many times as you want for full credit. Thus over the course of an hour you can retake the quiz enough times to brute force a perfect score without breaking the letter (and arguably the spirit) of the honor code.

Another interesting aspect of this "online ethics" is that there's no technical measures preventing you from pulling up past quiz results, and even if there was, you could still keep previous sessions open in a browser and even if there were countermeasures against that (javascript erasing), JS could be disabled, etc.

The Programming Projects that ML class had were slightly better metric of performance as there's more work that would have to be plagiarized, and if you're just going to go through life outsourcing all of your work then I guess that's your prerogative. However, I think that if you wanted to be very serious about actually testing for knowledge of material then the addition of some sort of interview component (phone/skype session), while time-consuming, could help.

cshesse• 15 years ago

In a way, yes, the programming projects in ML seemed like a better measure of performance in that you have to actually figure something out. However, they have two (sort of) disadvantages vs normal homework:

1) you immediately know if you got it right or wrong when you submit, so you can to a lesser extent brute force the correct answer

2) with the exception of maybe the first assignment, they are all "fill in the blank" sort of programming assignments. You basically just have to find the equations they give you in the PDF, translate them directly to Octave, and bam you're done.

Technophilis2• 15 years ago

It is surprising that you thought of this as a "cool AI job offer". I have two remarks here. First, the email sent to the class is barely an invitation to send resumes. Something many programmers/CS Students with online presence experience on a regular basis. Probably not from a Stanford Professor but at least from major companies recruiters. It would be interesting to know how many will actually make it through the screening, phone/on-site interviews and get a job offer.

Second, I registered for the Machine Learning course (I am not sure if the same applies to the AI course) and I compared it with the actual ML course at Stanford (CS229) (I mainly looked at Youtube videos of Andrew[1] as well as Assignments/Midterm[2]). The latter is by far more advanced and theoretical. The assignments tend to test more than basic comprehension of the material presented in the lectures, which is exactly what the online course reviews tend to evaluate. They require strong mathematical knowledge and obviously a minimum level of creativity/intelligence.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=machine+learning...

[2] http://cs229.stanford.edu/

plinkplonk2• 15 years ago

"It is surprising that you thought of this as a "cool AI job offer"."

I don't. That part of the post was written with tongue firmly attached to cheek. If that tone didn't come through, that means I have to improve my writing.

The online ML course is CS 229A (which is also an actual course at Stanford. The online version is close to the Stanford course).

The "tough" version is CS 229 (no 'A' at the end). I registered for the ML course thinking it was an online version of CS 229 and dropped out when it was confirmed to be 229A. In my politically incorrect opinion, 229A is close to worthless. The math is important in real world ML. This course included gems such as "if you don't know what a derivative is, that is fine".

The online AI course is almost exactly the same course as Stanford (CS 221), minus, of course, the programming assignments. It is an introductory, broad based course, and it does the job well (imo)

The online DB course is almost (if not exactly) the same as Stanford CS 145. I think this was the best course of the three.

All courses track the corresponding Stanford courses.

jpeterson2• 15 years ago

I know a few people (who shall remain nameless) who collaborate and check each others

Why would someone do this for a free online course that gives no credit for a degree? I mean, the whole point is to learn, not get the highest grade. I really fail to understand people sometimes.

llimllib2• 15 years ago

Because they suspected that there might be value in getting great scores? (As has been proven true?)

sbochins• 15 years ago

Bragging rights?

dwiel• 15 years ago

Its possible that to them, the scores aren't important and its a more conducive (and realistic) learning environment if they work together to solve the problems rather than doing it alone. There are many advantages:

* rather than just giving up on a problem, you can talk it out and learn together * you get the opportunity to teach the material that you think you know that others find hard (a good heuristic for problems you may have just barely understood, but gotten correct anyway). Teaching material is a great way to learn it, and expose any gaps you might have in your knowledge. * instant feedback on problems while they are still fresh in your memory

robryan3• 15 years ago

Why do people keep coming back to games like farmville and games are now rampart with side achievements with little point like collect 300 x in zone y? I think some people on some level would feel the need to use all means available to maximise scores purely as something that needs to be checked off like achievements in games.

jonknee2• 15 years ago

People form study groups all the time, it's a great way to learn. Since it's a free online course all of the benefit is what you actually learn, there is no way to cheat. At least that's my point of view (I am not in any of the classes, but wouldn't hesitate to co-work on stuff if I was).

jgeerts• 15 years ago

Because of this:

Your final score will be calculated as 30% of the score on the top 6 of your 8 homework assignments, 30% your score on the midterm exam, and 40% your score on the final exam. For those completing the advanced track you will receive your final score as a percentage as well as your percentile ranking within all those who completed the advanced track, and this will appear on your statement of accomplishment. The statement of accomplishment will be sent via e-mail and signed by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. We hope to have them digitally signed to verify their authenticity. It will not be issued by Stanford University.

psyklic• 15 years ago

I can't comment on online courses, but in general there is a HUGE difference between people who get As and people who get 100% on every single assignment. Never making a single error is an amazing feat.

I personally have only scored straight-100%s in a single course (Python programming), and that was only because I was relatively an expert in the material before the course began.

maeon3• 15 years ago

If you are getting 100's on everything it means you are gaming the spirit of the learning, overfitting the memory. Plop that guy in front of a computer with specs and a deadline and you will learn why grades are not an indicator of success.

jpeterson2• 15 years ago

Well, finding out that I've no chance of making the top 1,000 in the class or any opportunity of a job is certainly a swift kick in the huevos, 2 days before the final...

agentultra• 15 years ago

Bugger. I had to drop out because my cat died and I fell behind on the home work. I hope they do it again.

jongraehl• 15 years ago

That this inevitably leaked due to someone's bragging will encourage future cheating.

On the other hand, it was inevitable that as long as "grades" or equivalent are officially certified (even though the course is not for degree credit), that people would collect online courses as credentials. Wherever there's signaling value, there will be cheaters faking the signal.

Disclaimer: I got the email and missed two homework questions.

Job placement program for top students in Stanford's online AI class

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