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

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).<p>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 common and encouraged even when the official requirement is to do your own work. And those happen to be countries filled with millions of smart people. India, China, and Russia seem to be the heart of the phenomenon. Google, Facebook, and Topcoder have systems to deal with it but ai-class.org does not.<p>Anyway I'm neither surprised nor disappointed not to be in the top sliver. I'm not hireable anyway. It's funny that there is an identifiable top 1,000 at all instead of 10k+ perfect scores.

Getting new jobs is great. However, stay put in your jobs. Try to apply what you learned to little problems at work. Everyone has a huge database these days. I work for a medical device company and I write software that processes blood (embedded stuff). Every year, a million or so run logs find their way into one of our databases. There is a wealth of information there that we could figure out. Eg. How do me maximize yield, what's the best we can do with a certain type of donor. Do we perform worse on people in a certain geographic region etc. Eventually make useful predictions based on that data. Granted, that is not what I was hired to do, but I'm going to do it in my "free" time.<p>Why? Because it is interesting. Find something to apply to that might add value to the business. If a enough people do that, AI techniques might become common place. Get on Kaggle, GitHub your next project etc. Putting what we've learned to practical use is how we can proliferate and disseminate this knowledge. This was the intent of the class in the first place anyway.<p>tl;dr Using this course as a gateway to your next job is shortsighted IMO.

Drat. If I'd known they were going to do that, I'd have made sure I was in the top 1000.<p>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 them. This approach is relaxing and fun, but does increase the tendency to make silly mistakes and not catch them (which I in fact have done a few times now).<p>I am, it turns out, enjoying the material enough that I think I would like, if I ever find myself looking for a job, to find one where I can use this stuff.

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.<p>That's at least partly due to an extremely effective teaching system and style, so I'd say it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

As someone doing the course i would say its a decent way to identify some candidates but it wont be a really high correlation. It depends a lot on the time you have to invest and how rigorously you go through your answers and study the material the questions are drawn from. Some programming challenges would be great to better separate whether people really understood the material despite being harder to mark.<p>Personally I've always got a bit wrong in most of he homeworks but usually felt that while I understood the material I didn't recite enough time to rigorously check my answers and rewatch the materials to pick up on some of the subtle things you need to remember or some questions.

A program like this is a great way to promote cheating.

Prof Thrun mentioned in the last office hours that there were about 1650 people with "perfect scores" and he seemed a little thunderstruck by that and said he would admit these folks into Stanford if he could, because they are (paraphrasing, from memory)"Stanford quality".<p>What struck me was how much importance he gave to this metric, which isn't <i>that</i> hard to game on an online offering.<p>I know a few people (who shall remain nameless) who collaborate and check each others answers and so on before submission, in direct violation of the Stanford policy (and have 100s or close to it), and so probably have received this mail, whereas more "deserving" (note quotes) people who honestly work through the course material may not because they have, say, a 85% or 90% score.<p>That said, my key takeaway from this is that professors are very impressed by <i>perfect</i> scores irrespective of how you got them. There must be something magical about that row of 100s. Once you set up a grading/ranking system, it is psychologically very hard not to admire people who end up at the top.<p>I am personally a little dubious that the people with the highest scores would make the best pool of employees, especially given that this is an online course <i>without</i> the programming component, but what do I know?<p>I wrote Java code for most of the algorithms in AIMA as a side project a few years ago [1], and after I read an online post by Peter Norvig saying a few of his students had tried and failed a few times (to implement the code <i>in Java</i>- Common Lisp code existed and the Python version was in its infancy), I sent him the code and this became the "official" java distribution for AIMA ( though I don't maintain it anymore- the immensely talented Ciaran O'Reilly of the Stanford Research Institute does) and no one <i>ever</i> invited me to Stanford or offered me a cool AI job[2], sob! :-P.<p>No I am <i>not</i> bitter I tell you, not even the teeniest bit :-p [3]<p>I wonder how this signalling will play into the upcoming courses? If there are tangential real world benefits to be gained by attempting a "perfect" score, then you can expect a lot more game playing wrt scores and exams.<p>[1] More about how Peter Norvig shredded my initial code etc here <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405277" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405277</a><p>[2] though eventually, after a lot more work, it did lead to my working on good ML/robotics etc projects <i>from Bangalore</i>, which is a hard thing to do in the Great Outsourcing Wasteland.<p>[3] I am really <i>not</i> bitter.<p>I wrote the code for the hell of it, not to get a job. AIMA was my introduction to the fascinating field of AI. It is a great, great book and it has a <i>lot</i> more material than is covered in the course.<p>I once did want to go to Stanford and learn from the great profs there, but now in a "mountain comes to Mohammed" fashion, Stanford is coming to me. I don't care about the credentialling - I just want to learn. I took the AI online course and enjoyed Peter's and Sebastian's teaching immensely. Fwiw I should have a high 90's score, (I didn't add it all up) but nowhere near a perfect score.

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 ;)<p>Its wonderful that Sebastian &#38; Peter are reaching out like this after all they have done so far. Congrats to everyone that slugged it out, and good luck on the final this weekend!

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.<p>They will also probably look closely at that optional programming assignment as well.<p>I knew there was a reason Google let Peter Norvig take the time to do this ;)

Surprised no-one brought it up yet: What I'd like to know is if anyone involved with the class is getting a referral bonus for bringing candidates to companies...<p>Follow up is how we feel about that...

Just want to mention that the start-up behind ai-class.com is looking for great engineers. If you're interested in education shoot me an email at ih@knowlabs.com.

That this inevitably leaked due to someone's bragging will encourage future cheating.<p>On the other hand, it was inevitable that as long as "grades" or equivalent are officially certified (even though the course is not for degree credit), that people would collect online courses as credentials. Wherever there's signaling value, there will be cheaters faking the signal.<p>Disclaimer: I got the email and missed two homework questions.

Why are they sending out this letter before the final?

This type of thing wouldn't help you get a job with me. It could make a difference in getting an interview with me, if you had no real experience on your resume/CV. I want a well-balanced team player, that has a good chance to flourish on my team. Do course grades correlate with real-world flourishing on my team? Of course not.

Bugger. I had to drop out because my cat died and I fell behind on the home work. I hope they do it again.

It seems that this was sent to students with 100% aggregate score up to this point (after dropping the bottom two quizes). One acquaintance had 1 wrong in aggregate and another had 0 wrong in aggregate but two imperfect quizes, and only the latter claims to have received the letter.

It would be interesting to know what data they use for these kinds of assessments outside the given ones for the course, that is the best 6 homeworks out of 8 account for 30% of the grade, the midterm for 30% and the final exam for 40%.

Well, finding out that I've no chance of making the top 1,000 in the class or any opportunity of a job is certainly a swift kick in the huevos, 2 days before the final...<p>:(

Is this for real? Can anyone verify that this letter was in fact sent out?

Maybe, but be careful and think 'long shot':<p>I was one of three researchers in a team at Yorktown Heights that did some of the best research in AI in the world, published a string of peer-reviewed papers, was the source of two commercial products, gave a paper at the AAAI IAAI conference in Stanford with for that year the 25 best AI applications in the world, personally won an award, etc.<p>I've taught computer science at Georgetown University and Ohio State University. My Ph.D. is in applied math.<p>Once in my career, just as a 'scientific programmer', in two weeks I sent a few resume copies, went on seven interviews, and got five offers.<p>But after my Ph.D. and AI work, I sent over 1000 resumes to Google, Microsoft, GE, FedEx, and hundreds more, got only five interviews, and no offers. I got a nice letter back from Fisher Black (as in Black-Scholes) saying that he saw no applications of applied math or AI at GS.<p>I ask you: Who will hire you in AI and why?<p>In business, hiring is because some manager has some work to do and a budget to do it. That manager believes that they know nearly all that is needed to do the work and otherwise would not be betting his career on the work. Thus, the manager is not hiring high technical expertise he doesn't have. Instead the manager is, as on a factory floor 100 years ago, hiring labor to add 'muscle' to his work.<p>In particular, unless the manager knows AI, he won't be hiring for AI. And there is at most only a tiny chance that the manager knows AI and even less chance that his project will depend on AI.<p>Moreover, the manager does not want competition from below and does not want his project 'disrupted' from below so really doesn't want technical expertise above what is needed just to get his project done.<p>Net, if you know some AI and want to use it in business, then find an application and start your own business. Then, since you know AI, you won't have to hire anyone in AI either.<p>What I've said here for AI holds for essentially all advanced academic topics.<p>Sorry 'bout that.