For a while, that's the worst course of scala specialization. All the parallelism is just obvious division of a one big piece on several small pieses, and perfrom parrallel tasks on it. It's enogh to write merge sort with several threads to get the main idea, which is proposed here. You don't need to watch 4 weeks of coursera video and perform tasks to get it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I expected something more than trivial division. Besides that, I don't like the tasks. And I hate the last one week. Very bad description of the problem, it made me really suffer. I'd like much more the first 2 courses. Which I rated as 5 and 4 accordingly, but this one is fail. Besides that, I like the theory about parallel and concurent programming, and all the stuff about "iron". Hope the 4th one course will be better.

The course presents two core approaches to parallel programming - task and data parallelism. While these concepts are really useful, I expected more details on, for example, how to implement the _parallel_ construct used throughout the lectures. The materials were good and I can use some of the ideas straight after the lectures in my everyday coding, but the assignments were really slightly related to the topic.

Barnes Hut simulation assignment. I'd say it has nothing in common with parallel programming in Scala. It looks like the authors looked for some real-life example or use case for Combiners and this simulation model looked nice. But, really, does any developer not working in university would ever use it? It's completely impractical, the most of the time I spent reading the description of simulation model, but the coding itself was just playing with 2D coordinates and some basic recursion. I'd expect something more practical, e.g. implementing simplified form of Hadoop map-reduce or something like that so I can use it after the course. But Barnes-Hut is too specific and is pretty far from everyday problems developers encounter.

Academical with close to no real life value.

Rather theoretical introduction to the basics of an interesting subject. Regretfully examples and assignments are frequently overly complex in areas which are unrelated to the subject. In addition, people who work with software development should expect to look further if they aim to add to their toolbox.

Some exercises need some improvement. Tests were not that helpful and the instruction to the last homework was quite bad (many open questions).

to much math

The code examples in this course are extremely convoluted. In particular, please don't put multiple statements per line...