Course evaluation for STV2020, Spring 2025

About the course

• STV2020 is a very practical course that teaches students to collect data from various types of sources, to write efficient R code, to work with different data types (including spatial data), to integrate code and text in fully reproducable Quarto documents, and to create beautiful and effective data visualizations. There is no reading list, but students have access to a https://pages.github.uio.no/oyvinsti/STV2020/ - [brutt lenke], which introduces the various topics and that includes tutorials and exercies.
• Throughout the course, students work on a term paper in which they should collect, wrangle, and visualize some data to answer a research questions of their own choosing. Students get feedback on the their term papers through three mandatory hand-ins.
• Through developing and answering a research question, students also get good practice in doing political science as opposed to just reading about it.
• Overall, students learn a lot in this course. Most students enroll in the course without being very proficient in writing R code, but end up writing term papers that demonstrate a very good command of R and many students engage with substantive political science literatures in their term papers.

Feedback from student contact

• The course is very good.
• It is very nice to have a course without a reading list, which instead emphasizes practical skills. I have taken stv2022 previously and while that course was also very good, it was more heavy on theory. The two courses complement each other well.
• Even if I have already taken stv2022, I get a lot from focusing on the programming fundamentals and writing more efficient code through stv2020.
• I am using the course website a lot! I am using it both as a check list to make sure that I have learned all the relevant content and to look up ways to solve different problems I encounter in the term paper.
• Both the seminars and the lectures (particularly the living coding!) are very good.
• I would advice keeping both the seminars and the lectures. I learn of lot from code being explained in plenary during the lectures. “Coffee and coding” is also a great resource.
• It is difficult to know in the beginning of the course what will be realistic to achieve in the term paper.

Comparison with previous years

• Compared to previous iterations of the course, more students were eager to employ regression techniques in their term papers. This likely speaks to the improved learning outcomes in other courses (stv1020 and for some students also stv2022). While this this a very welcome development, it creates a dilemma concerning whether stv2020 should continue to emphasize data collection and descriptive visualizations only or if the course should also include components for instance on how to visualize regression results and compare/evaluate the results of different regression models.
• ChatGPT and similar tools created more of a challenge in 2025 than in 2024 (when those tools were also available to students). It is not necessarily a problem that students use large language models to aid their programming, but it has become a problem that some students become too reliant on ChatGPT early on and therefore fail to learn the basic programming skills that they need to understand and correct solutions proposed by ChatGPT. Some students also fail to write good prompts because they lack a good understanding of what they would like to achieve. We may need to offer students more guidance on how they more effectively can incorporate ChatGPT and similar tools in their workflow.
• Previous course contacts have recommended even more individual work at the expense of lecturing. This year, the feedback was that we struck a good balance between lecturing and practical exercises. It is, of course, very hard to know how much this is due to the improvements in the course and how much is due to differences between different student contacts.
• The deadline for approving compulsory activities was very early this year (April 10), which is a relatively long time before the deadline for submitting the term paper (May 7). This resulted in the students not having sufficient time to work on the term papers between each of the three mandatory hand-ins and that students were left without an opportunity for written feedback on their term papers for about a month towards the end of the course. The early deadline for approving compulsory activities very likely had a negative impact on learning outcomes in the course.

Overall assessment by the course convenor

• We have now had several iterations of this course. While we keep adjusting how we teach the various components and the balance between practical exercises and traditional lecturing, the overall assessment is that the course works very well. Most of the students learn a lot and also seem to enjoy the course.
• The issues related to the early deadline for approving compulsory activities presented the biggest challenge this year. It also led to the waste of department teaching resources as time was spent giving feedback on drafts that students had very little time to improve since the previous round of feedback. These issues are extremely frustrating both for the teachers and the students and likely impact negatively on the learning outcomes.