Prologue of a survey and critique on the course 'Computer Applications for Financial Management'

Here’s a prologue on some comments on the course ‘‘Computer Applications for Financial Management". The course design has won multiple awards, and is made to be an obligatory course for all students in Shanghai University of Finance and Economics—for 2 credits, but 64 hours of course loads for one semester.

Basically what it does is teaching one how to do Excel to do some higher-level data analysis. It’s a shallow touch into various data analysis perspectives: database tools, a bit of light coding and some basic visualizations.

I have received mixed and polarized comments for this course. One one hand, there’s plentiful anecdotal comments by some alumni in the industry claiming that it’s the most useful course ever offered. On the other hand, my friends including myself thought the course is tediously boring and somewhat unnecessary for students with coding background.

I am opposed to the idea of making the course such an obligatory heavy load for all students in a whole university. I will systematically analyze my counter arguments later. Stay tuned👊.