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Comment by TinyBig | Hacker News Reader

I've taken a few courses on Coursera, including the deep learning specialization, and I thought the material was great. However, I noticed that in courses with ~5 hours of video, quizzes, and a project, the average completion times were measured in minutes. Based on this, I assume most people who received certificates cheated and didn't take the course, though I'm very much open to alternate hypotheses.

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I heard that there is a 'trick' to getting a certificate for free ($) on Coursera: First you just review the course which is free of charge, and then after you're done with it all you start the free trial. Now you have 7 days to finish up the courses which shouldn't be a problem due to the reviewing.

So that could in part explain the short completion times, although I'm not sure how many people use this 'trick'. Coincidentally though, I've learnt about this trick in relation to the exact course you mentioned (deep learning.)

From Coursera Terms and Conditions[1]:

"If you complete a course during the free trial period, Coursera reserves the right to require you to pay for a one-month subscription in order to receive a Course and/or Specialization Certificate."

[1] https://www.coursera.org/about/terms

I took the DL specialization and it took me a while because I worked really diligently through every single thing and made sure I understood before moving on. It was purely for self knowledge and the certificate was super tangential to my aims. I noticed later that basically all notebooks were copied and out into GitHub and it would have been trivial to simply copy and paste all answers and get a certificate.

That made me pretty convinced a cert wouldnt be worth much, which is unfortunate because I really put in the work to learn the material. OTOH, I largely consider certificates to be a bogus signal, and even often negative, so that not really surprising.

I know people who freely admit (at least to me) of speeding through the courses and just getting the cert.

I have also done it for various unwanted corporate training. :)

So that hypothesis makes sense.

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