Professor Perlmutter is an AMAZING professor! He is funny and his lectures are extremely engaging. He gets students engage as he teaches us coding. He gives us interesting examples like 867-5309 Jenny. His coding homework definitely makes you think, but once you get it the homework gets really easy. Exams are not worth a lot due to the pandemic, so the grade is weight towards the homework. Definitely would take again!

Professor Perlmutter approached this COVID 19 situation in a very good manner. Although he was an excellent professor, I personally don't think this class was made for beginners. I had some prior coding experience in high school and what I learned then was relatively comparable. Still, I struggled a bit with the homework and got frustrated at times, which is the nature of coding. The homeworks are worth 80% of your final grade and are the most time-consuming portion of the class. His midterm and finals were structured differently and were stress-free, and concepts were from lectures. I do think Perlmutter is an excellent professor though, there probably is not going to be a better choice than him, truly think he cares about his students and wants the give the best grades possible. Would recommend.

Professor Perlmutter is extremely fair, clear, helpful, and humorous. I would definitely recommend taking his PIC16A. You will get an A if you watch all the mandatory recorded lectures, take notes, and honestly try the homework.

The homework is generally easy, but I did get to make very cool data visualizations and learn Python programming.

I found some of the mandatory lectures not in-depth in terms of explaining the syntax but I guess his teaching is already enough for an intro class.

He also recorded his live lectures, which I found helpful, especially for review purposes. In the summer, these lectures were not mandatory but I would still recommend them.

I found the final project incredibly rewarding given that I spent many hours coding, thinking, and asking for help on the Campuswire forum.

After taking one of Professor Perlmutter's classes earlier in the year, I was slightly disappointed with his PIC 16A class. The class focused heavily on group work. We had to meet twice a week to work on a discussion worksheet with 2 random teammates from the class. Although these worksheets were only graded on completion, the activities required some degree of unnatural socialization with teammates that I just didn't vibe with. Although I'm sure some students had teammates they got along with, it was painfully obvious that my teammates were uninterested in the class and expected me to do most of the work for them, making discussion activities rather unproductive. Since there was such a heavy focus on group work in this class, getting bad teammates that you have to stick with for the whole quarter makes the class hard to enjoy.

Homework made the greatest contribution to our grades and was helpful. I have no complaints about this portion of the class.

Students were required to take a quiz after every lecture. This amounted to more than 20 quizzes throughout the quarter. I feel like this is the aspect of the class that students disliked the most. Questions were poorly worded and, at times, tested our understanding of unimportant nuances from lecture rather than the important general takeaways. As we transition away from online learning, however, I feel like they will phase out the quizzes.

The class regularly has a final exam, but our class did not because we had a shortened summer quarter. Instead, we had a midterm exam and mini-project. The midterm exam was extremely straightforward and easier than homework assignments. On the other hand, the mini-project was tedious and unenjoyable. We were required to work on the project with our discussion teammates, and I ended up having a really bad time working on the project because my teammates didn't care as much about the class as me and were resistant to put any effort into their work. Groups are graded as a team, so it annoyed me that my grade in the class had to be tethered to students who didn't care as much about the class or their grades as I did.

Overall, I would recommend that you take PIC 16A with Professor Perlmutter! In general, the content is so much more engaging than the PIC 10 series since what you learn has tangible applications (you learn about machine learning, how to develop data visualizations, etc, instead of trying to code random functions that don't really serve a purpose, as you might in PIC 10A). I really enjoyed how PIC16A also tied into the concept of algorithmic bias, so as a Life Sciences major, it really opened my eyes to the media I consume/the algorithms I interact with on a daily basis.

This class does have a lot of components:
- Group project (you can think of this as the final)
- Informal final (to reinforce your efforts during the group project, it's very easy)
- Weekly HW assignments
- Mandatory discussions and discussion assignments with your group
- Midterm exam (open for 24 hours on Gradescope)
- Flipped classroom format: videos and readings before each lecture and corresponding quizzes (to be transparent, I didn't do the readings and I was fine)

He also offers very generous extra credit, in the form of writing an optional essay on a pertinent topic related to data science and society.

The homework assignments can be challenging, but I would highly recommend you attend his office hours as the professor is very approachable and wants to help you solve the problems; you are never made to feel dumb for asking a question.

The group project is probably the most difficult part of the course, but if you follow along with his pre-class lecture notes and the discussion worksheet, it should be very do-able.

I can confidently say I have learned a lot from this course. Although I am not planning on pursuing data science or CS in my career, I'm glad I took this and it has made me a lot more interested in the connections between data and society!