Is the uni of Leeds a good choice for studying an MSc in Artificial Intelligence?

24022021_m

Hi,
just asking a little piece of advice from someonw who has some sort of knowledge in the field of universities ranking, in particular artificial intelligence.
Is the university of Leeds a good choice for studying an MSc in Artificial Intelligence? It will certainly be on-line. I would also be interested if you think there is a better university?
Thanks

Reply 1

Kehar

I'm currently in the last course before the final project. My advice is to avoid this program at all costs!!!! Almost everything that Leeds said is fraud.

1. No flexibility at all !!!! Although on their website, they divide their courses into compulsory modules and optional courses, this doesn't means you can choose the classes you want to take from the optional courses. All of them are compulsory !! Also, the sequence you study in those courses is fixed. If you want to skip one course for whatever reason. You have to delay your graduation date for 1 year. I knew that I would be swamped from March to July, but I had to take the two hardest courses if I dont want to waste one more year.

2. Poorly structured courses. You must complete each course within 7 weeks (6 weeks' content plus 1-week final test). You only got one week break between each module. For some accessible courses, this makes sense; yet, you some difficult ones, this structure is insane. Bear in mind this is a part-time degree most students have 20 hours of study time per week. For some modules, they want to master deep learning, reinforce learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning from scratch within 120 hours.

3. The difficulty of the course is insane. I believe handling this program is easy for someone with some background in programming, but the University of Leeds advertised their program as welcoming someone without a programming background, like me. Before studying this course, I have some basic calculus experience and zero coding experience. The difficulty for me is insane. I am a fast learner because I got distinctions in all the courses I passed, but courses like deep learning, robotics and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning are ridiculous for me. I failed the deep learning and Robotic course, although I got over 75% on one of the assignments (2 in total), which tested the basic concept.

4. The quality of the module is rubbish. More than 80% of the content is purely presented as plain text. That webpage just copy-pasted from the textbook, plus some minor revisions. You can easily find all of that knowledge online. Only around 1/3 of modules have a lot of videos to explain the content. However, you can also find some better and more detailed videos on Youtube for free!! Just give you an example of the low quality of the content. The second part of the robotic module is about reinforce-learning. All you have is 12 Jupiter notebook files with some explanation. Besides this, all you have is 3 hours online seminar held by the instructor. You have to study and master the reinforce-learning within 3 weeks and train a robotic under the Virtual Machine. The instructors or TA will host an online seminar once a week; however, in most cases, that video seminar is poorly organized. In most cases, I have to rely on Youtube videos to solve my problem (Thanks to the StatQuest channel and those Indian instructors, you are my saver). The University of Leeds charged me over 1500 pounds per module. It provided very little help, and those Youtuber helped me a lot for free!

5. Extremely irresponsible or unhelpful staff. I didn't mean all of them but many of them. You can easily find that some instructors simply reuse the content from the previous year without any fixing. I feel alright to do so if there is no new content you need to add; however, please fix any mistakes and errors in the contents and homework!! I can understand that you are not a good lecturer and you can't explain your knowledge verbally, but fixing some obvious mistakes has nothing to do with ability but is related to responsibility. I can boldly guess that those instructors never really look at the student feedback. Besides the instructors, the other staffs are very irresponsible as well. They dispatch the wrong VM passcode at the beginning of the Robotic Reasoning and Logic modules. Some students said they had the exact same failure as last year. During the robotic modules, the staff did not release the second half of the contents more than 3 weeks late. I have to study reinforcement learning from zero to be able to train a virtual robotic model within 3 weeks. Fabulously. The grader is a joke as well. I got a high fever (very likely to be Covid-19) during the I wrote the first deep learning assessment. Although I feel bad, I thought I could still manage this assignment; however, I got some problems transferring the necessary data into the format I needed. I try more than 30 hours to fix this bug by suffering a high fever. In the end, I can't fix it. I decided to complete the following code and make the grader know my logic about this project and wish I could have some points from it. However, the grader simply runs the program and only grades the code before the bug. I acknowledge that the grader has the right to do this, but I feel insulted because I feel I paid a lot of effort and they treated me like a joker. Then I filed an application for mitigating circumstances. I explained that I got a high fever while I was writing this assignment. I simply asked the university to review my code after bugs and wish they could give me some points for my logic and knowledge understanding. However, 3 days later, I received a solid not due to a lack of evidence proving I got a high fever. Okay, fair enough. But in March this year, one week before the Robotic module's first test, my grandpa got a critical illness, and I had to travel aboard to take care of my grandpa. I am not sure I will be able to come back to study before the exam deadline. So I am applying for the mitigating circumstance once again and wish they can extend my deadline for an exam. I attached all the evidence I have in the application; however, this time, I didn't hear anything back until now. It is 82 days since I filed the application, and they are supposed to say yes or no within 3 days. I have to do the exam in my grandpa's warden and check my grandpa's status sometime during the exam. I will never forgive them.

6. Little support. Although the University of Leeds brags about its resources and Minvera system, do trust them. Indeed, Leeds has strong CS and AI research resources, but those have nothing to do with your study. Those resources, in general, have very little help for your study. Instead, you can only post your questions on the discussion board and wish someone would answer them. Unfortunately, most students are very quiet on the discussion board, and only a few of them wish to answer your questions. Some instructors are helpful, but some of them are not. The Minerva system, in my opinion, is simply the Blackboard platform with a cover of the University of Leeds, nothing special. Smartphone accessibility to online content is okay; however, you can't open the exercise on your cellphone. The University of Leeds is really good at bragging about its product. For example, on one module syllabus, they said there would be formative MCQs with automated feedback to help you understand the content. They didn't lay; there are some grade scope tests after each section with around 10 MCQs. Once you submit, they will automatically tell you which questions you are wrong. This is so-called automated feedback. No explanation for the question at all. I believe I can train my parrot to do the same thing within a month!

I have been studying in 4 different colleges in UK and US. The quality of this program is way below the standard. If you have enough background and money, come to this program and get a degree from a "prestige" university. Otherwise, stay away from this program. You can find a much better study program somewhere else with 1/20 of the price. In the end.