S
strong-lynx-4565
August 2, 2025summer 2025
Edited
⭐Rating: 4 / 5📚Difficulty: 2 / 5⏱️Workload: 6 hrs/week😊Sentiment: Positive
• 3 Credit Hours
Key adjectives used by students — color intensity reflects sentiment
strong-lynx-4565
Edited
warm-meteor-1923
Edited
gentle-cobra-4140
It is "easy" in that you do not have to think but a huge waste of time. You will spend 10+ hours on some of the worksheets and they don't align with the videos. If you are going to spend the time you might as well take something useful.
Edited
quick-spider-1299
Easy class with garbage contents. Just waste time to find what excel part went wrong. Unnecessary work could be eliminated. TA's aren't good at giving hints for formulas.
Edited
bold-heron-5210
Pair this course with another more challenging one. For the group assignments, I recommend just having one group member inputting everything, and the others just do the conceptual quiz and verify the excel sheets. There are enough assignments for you to take turns.
There are even some weeks that you can do nothing and focus on other courses. After all being said, avoid this course if you don't want an easy A.
Edited
joyful-parrot-8425
Tedious videos. Everything is done on Excel. No creativity or intelligence required. You are expected to mindlessly copy paste each cell formula for every assignment which takes a long time and any tiny mistake will cost you points. Easy A still. But no learning happens in this class. Honestly, this class really should be removed from OMSCS program.
Edited
strong-salmon-3459
Edited
brave-giraffe-1713
Edited
graceful-crow-5010
Edited
frank-badger-8837
Edited
This course teaches the following:
At the end of the course, you will have one comprehensive excel file that starts with financial statements downloaded from the internet and ends with a full valuation.
There are a lot of topics that are covered. These topics are what you would typically learn in an MBA program, as part of core finance. However, in this course, you will actually implement it.
I liked the course because it reinforced what I had learned in my MBA program.
The assignments are a cake walk because you are actually given the exact instructions that you need to follow and then there is another file that serves as your North Star, so when you compute the numbers, you know what the answer must look like.
There is a ton of Excel use in this course. You will learn a lot of formulae and some cool things like Data Tables and Solve.
The presentation material is really light, since 95%+ focus is on using excel to actually do the valuation.
I wish the course delved into the theory a bit more, so that students develop a strong intuition. For instance, Valuation is both an art and a science (Prof. Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern). We learnt mostly the science part, but the more important part around assumptions and the rationale behind the assumptions is missing.
You would like this course if you want to actually see how the different finance formulae work together. You will not like this course, if you are looking for a typical analytics or computer science course.
I also feel that given that Python is used in Finance more commonly that the professor considers redoing the lectures in Python. I know that will be a complete re-write, but it will make the course more relevant.
Absolute waste of money and time. Not sure how this course was allowed to be part of masters program. All you do is spend hours every week filling blanks on Excel worksheet, blindly following the lecture videos from 2017. Most of the questions on the class forum is answered by TA saying "just follow the lecture video step by step."
They really should rename the course to "Typing accounting numbers on Excel sheet."
If you enjoy filing tax return, by entering numbers into a form one by one, copying W2 form, then you will love this course.
The worst part is they force 4 mandatory group projects, for which 60% of your grade depends on. You have to complete many pages of massive Excel worksheet as a team. There is no automation, no coding, nothing. Just everybody typing in numbers to several hundred Excel cells. But those cells depend on each other. So if your team mate made a mistake, your cells get messed up.
There is no curve. The professor went on a rant to say how she does not believe in a curve. So if you must get your team projects done tightly. Overall so much stress from tedious work with no learning.
I got 98% (A). This course is the easiest and the stupidest course at the same time. Essentially you waste the whole semester spending hours every week filling blanks on Excel worksheets. The content is ridiculously shallow that I didn't learn anything beyond what 5 minutes of google would offer. Also the group project is stressful because you and three other people collectively have to complete a massive Excel sheet with several hundred empty cells that depend on each other in a complicated way, such as circular reference. So if your team mate made a tiny mistake, then all your cells can be corrupt and you have no way of verifying your answer. It's still an easy A but it's just so wasteful of time and money to spend a whole semester on this silly Excel exercise.
1 put in may 2-3 hours a week. Sometimes less than an hour. Perfect to pair with ML/DL/NLP or other advanced classes. It takes more time to verify all the work than it takes to actually do the homework. You can follow along the lectures easily to finish the homework. The quizzes mostly were easy. The group project is a hit or a miss, my group was excellent. I will say they are strict in terms of the excel sheets, they want everything EXACTLY the way they write down in the explanation. Which is why I said most of my time in finishing the homeworks actually went into reviewing my work 2-3 times just to make sure I didn't leave anything out. Would recommend if you can get in. Its hella easy.
While I fully agree with other reviews that say this course is just an Excel exercise course, I actually want to highlight another stressful aspect of the course, that is the group project.
The substantial portion (60%) of the entire course grade comes from 4 group projects. Because this course has established a reputation of "useless content but super easy A", it attracts the least motivated students on average. I had a team mate who was taking this course along with other course and had no time at all for this course. I had another team mate who didn't wanna start working on his part until the very day of the project due date. Another team mate disappeared and eventually dropped out of the course without notifying the team.
Half of your group project grade comes from peer review. So there is prisoner's dilemma. It's still easy to score overall 90% for the course to secure A, but it's stressful because you may have to constantly chase your team mates or you have to do it all by yourself. It's indeed boring to have to keep typing into Excel cells exactly following the hours of video. The professor explicitly says she never applies grading curve. So 90% is a hard cutoff for A. Depending on how unlucky you get with team members, you may get a B.
If I could go back in time, I would've have taken this course.
The easiest A ever. Learned a few Excel functions and that's it. All the lecture videos are from around late 2017 and a lot of the contents are stale. Like they show you how to get financial statements data from SEC website whose interface changed a lot since then. They show you how to use Excel functions which are now obsolete. This is especially annoying because every assignment is "type exactly as is, following the videos" and any deviation will be penalized. And 90% of TA response on Ed forum to student questions asking for clarification is "just follow the lecture videos exactly as is" -- they really should re-record and update the lecture videos then. duh. I learned a few Excel functions and nothing else.