Learner Reviews & Feedback for Interest Rate Models by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

It's good but the exercise is much hard

Great course! If you have not deep economic/financial background (f.i., I am an engineer) you should not rely too much to the expected time required to complete the week assignment, especially weeks 4 and 5. Lectures have a marked mathematical facet (it's a financial mathematics course, after all!) and exercises are well designed to make you understand the matter. The final exam stays in ~200 lines of Matlab (comments included), so if you are committed you will succeed.

Great course to refresh interest rate finance theory and to learn something new as well. Topics are very relevant for real-world finance practice. Exercises are built to make you gain working knowledge of the material. Maybe a couple of additional (optional) videos with more detailed derivations of some pricing formulas would be a useful addition to the course.

The sophisticated theory is being delivered in a very accurate and rigorous manner with references to market practice. Thank you authors and I'm waiting for the new courses in quantitative finance with the level of sophistication not less than this one.

An excellent course, well structured and clearly taught. The tests were very challenging but interesting. Not being a financial graduate I found the learning curve very steep but it was very stimulating and enjoyable: the course not only taught me a lot about financial models relating to interest rates but also gave me some entry points into interesting mathematics (measure theory, martingales, stochastic calculus)

Difficult but interesting course. Only it took me more time than announced to complete it and perhaps additional materials (articles, link to thesis etc...) would be beneficial

Great course! Level of difficulty is about first or second year Ph.D. in economics/finance. I learned a lot.

-Michael

Very challenging and rewarding course, the treatment of interest rates is of the level of a Master's degree in financial mathematics. I would advise anyone attempting this course to get at least a little more exposure to stochastic calculus before attempting it even though it already provides a small crash course.

wonderful

Finally finished! It's quite difficult, but really learned a lot! Thank you!

Very interesting and engaging course. It covers relevant topics in fixed income derivatives. It's rather challenging and requires some prior knowledge of quantitative finance/mathematics (and more time than stated in the syllabus :)). Also not possible to pass without some programming skills. What I didn't like is that instructor didn't provide economic intuition behind math formulas and models but rather presented them from a purely mathematical perspective.

Very helpful course to revisit my daily work covering curves, derivative pricing.

Solid review of fundamental interest rate ide

This course has been quite challenging, which I really have enjoyed. I guess this course is a shorter and easier version of the real course the professor teaches at his own institution. It only covers about one third of his text book, but now I know I can finish the textbook by myself. I strongly recommend to future learners that they get his textbook. I learned more from examples given the textbook. Since there didn't seem many learners on this course, it was quite frustrating to find a little mistake that I was making, but I guess that understanding whether the mistakes are conceptual or computational is also an important part of financial engineering. Anyway, I hope he will offer more of courses like this on coursera.

A really useful and practical course in Quantitative Finance, which really raises the bar in terms of difficulty but also the knowlegde gained is definitely there. I would recommend this course even to seasoned industry professionals (e.g. traders, quants, portfolio managers) since it provides relevant techniques for measuring and managing interest rate risk and understanding interest rates derivatives space/markets. On the other hand I do feel that with useful comments, provided by the Coursera community, this course can only become better, as time goes by.

This is a seriously challenging class, requiring some good preparation, but it is worth every minute. The course staff members are very helpful. The problems are challenging and they are well worth doing. Good luck!

Amazing course with a great exposé of each concept and extremely well designed assignments. The contents are brilliant, really clear, the study materials are well designed. The assignments help to recognize blind spots in the understanding of the concepts and push to implement the contents. It is a really nice balance between knowledge and know-how. Also a really tough one but "pain will make it better".

Interesting course, I learned a lot. Exercises a bit tedious sometimes and pass rate fairly high, given that 80% normally grants you the distinction in UK, not just a pass rate. Also ideally you would like the entire body of the exercise checked by the instructors, not just the final number, but I guess this would be too much for a Coursera course. Overall a very good course.

Great course!

This course is very good in regaining your knowledge in Interest Rate model. However, the exchange is that you have to spend time with it. But believe me it is worth your time spending

Excellent Classes. Quite Difficult.

Solid contents, also required solid graduate level mathematics. The instructor may consider providing more details in some of the derivations. It is a bit difficult to follow during some lectures.

Great course and I learned a lot from it, much more than I initially anticipated. The staff is very supportive and gives right advise when there is a need. Would like to see more intuitive explanations along with the mathematical derivations. Not an easy course but really worth to take it to the end.

Very engaging materials and it is a difficult course!! Background in linear algebra, stochastic calculus and computer programming is recommended.

Content wise this course is excellent, quant finance enthusiasts would love this course. Truth be told this is an insanely difficult MOOC to pass/complete, not because its hard, lets face it, the contents are very advanced and its assumed that students would have background in advanced finance, but the problem lies in the fact that the professor does not explain the topics well enough. The professor might be excellent in this field but simply can't explain well enough, he is mostly reading his notes/slides with a few drawings. Second problem is the notations used in the course is extremely confusing, it makes maths look scary. This could have been a the best MOOC on Coursera but the professor's explanation is simply not upto the mark.