Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pastebin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 115 posts

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

#11

Post by joshz »

rfrey wrote: post #2

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.

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) 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

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

#12

Post by clavalle »

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 ;)

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

#13

Post by rglullis »

rfrey wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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

#14

Post by prosody »

tzs wrote: post #6

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…

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.)

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

#15

Post by tzs »

Tichy wrote: post #8
tzs wrote: post #6

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…

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.

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.

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

#16

Post by learc83 »

WildUtah wrote: post #10

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 commo…

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

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

#18

Post by bgutierrez »

quasistar wrote: post #7

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 sl…

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.

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

#19

Post by brg »

clavalle wrote: post #12

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 ;)

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.

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

#20

Post by jorgeortiz85 »

rglullis wrote: post #13
rfrey wrote: post #2

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.

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…

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.

Post reply on HN