You can't avoid it, so the main question is how to approach it. Anyone who truly met the prerequisites for the program should be able to ace the course, so it could be taken at any time. The biggest part of the grade - and the largest time-sink - is the project. The grading on it seems fairly lenient, as long as the voluminous and inconsistent instructions are met, The few homework assignments are easy, although each might take a few hours to complete. As far as the lectures go, I watched many of them on 1.25x or 1.5x, which reduced my restlessness due to their rudimentary level. Some of the homework depends on the extra readings or, irritatingly, on the code from the TA sessions, but students could wait until they see the questions before delving into those sources.

It's not a horrible course (although the marketing section and the instructions are), and I especially appreciated the review of regression, which I found to be quite clear. But, if the assignments were harder, I would've studied more and thus retained more in the long term.