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Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

> The primary assessment for this course will be a take-home assignment issued at the end of the term. This assignment will ask questions drawing on the concepts and models discussed in the course, as well as from selected research publications.

Comes as a surprise that it's not a project, as, in my experience, all ML/ DL courses I've seen online from US universities (Cal, Stanford, etc.) require. Different university culture across the pond?

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Oxbridge is very much exam based assessment. With your degree depending only on the exams taken at the end of the final year. So the take-home assessments are there just to make sure that you understand what you're doing and can progress to the next part of the course.

I must say that I am rather glad the degree I did at a Scottish university was based mainly of 4th year exams, with an element of 3rd year exams and coursework.

The idea of a averaging all of your work across your course would have been a disaster for me as I did rather poorly in year 1, scraped through year 2 and did spectacularly well in years 3 and 4.

I'm not sure about Oxford but certainly for Cambridge you aren't graded overall, instead you get a grade for each part of the tripos[1] (two parts).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripos

Yes but you generally treat your degree as being graded by whatever you got in part II

In Oxford, at least for Physics, your grades from every year (except possibly the first) count, but they are heavily weighted towards later years.

> Comes as a surprise that it's not a project, as, in my experience, all ML/ DL courses I've seen online from US universities (Cal, Stanford, etc.) require. Different university culture across the pond?

from that same paragraph:

| The pratical (sic) component of the course will be assessed in the usual way.

have look at 'Lecture 2b - Overview of the Practicals.pdf' to be convincingly (imho) dissuaded of the fact that it was 'easy-peasy' :)

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