Reviews of professor Makram Talih

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Excellent course for a data scientist. The prof is knowledgeable, friendly, and accessible. Course is heavily project-based, with a group final project. Warning: he gives you a lot of s/w help, avoid taking this course if you're completely new to R due to the steep learning curve. Take STAT 484 first as a minimum (and ideally STAT 485, as well).

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Dr. Talih is a brilliant guy (PhD from Yale). I think he did a good job instructing this course. He is very helpful and the amount of quizzes, papers, and reading is reasonable. You learn a lot and the material is intriguing. ML is in high demand right now and Dr. Talih is a good communicator. I would certainly recommend his class.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
He's a friendly person. Tests just the right amount of challenging and also fair. Homework could be improved as it didn't seem to always connect very well to the week's topic. Grading is more project-based than exam-based than similar classes, which was a nice change.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
SO MUCH busy work. The professor just sits back and does nothing while you struggle to teach yourself everything with useless notes and a terrible textbook. I used Google more than anything else, what a waste of money. Then you spend tons of time on these long reports, most of which have nothing to do with the class material. What a joke.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Dr. Talih was easy going and approachable, communicating quickly on message boards and emails. The course was fast paced; the content was tough but not impossible. Some prior knowledge of R / R Studio (or machine learning) is highly recommended, otherwise it's a steep learning curve. Best grad class I took so far!