Reviews of professor Xiongtao Dai

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Prof. Dai made this class 10x harder than it needed to be. He expected far too much from his students. Homework assignments were ridiculously hard and took HOURS. Each assignment took nearly 8-10 hours each week. FIND A FRIEND! Also, his lectures were exceptionally boring. Had this class had any other professor, I would have greatly enjoyed it.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
Dr. Dai is pretty dry as a lecturer but it seems like he wants to get better. He doesn't really inspire you and I stopped paying attention halfway through the semester. There were parts of the homework that involved using R to simulate that we're "required but not graded" so I didn't do that part and suffered no repercussions.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Very knowledgable on the material and explains it very well. You learn so much about R coding for statistics and data science in a short amount of time, sets you up very well for a future job. Only problem is that he isn't very available to help outside of class and his TA was terrible with grading and help on homework.

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
The grading in this class starts out very easy and then gets harder and harder and I mean unnecessarily harder. I would get docked points on labs and home-works for not valid reasons it was like they were looking for ways to take away points and find things wrong. The lectures are very boring the format of the class if basically like DS201 but in r

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
I am a honor student and ready to start my phd at top 3 ivys, so this is not about grading. 

Honestly, it is not about difficulty either, it is about his attitude towards students. He might be very smart, but he is kind of condescending in his teaching.  

Good luck with his next position, very much good luck with his next batch of students.