Took this class during COVID; the prof and TAs had some weird communication issues where the professor would say something about a due date and the TAs would lag behind a little on getting the news out to all students. They did their best though! Whenever more than a few people asked for an extension, it was given globally to the whole class. Eleazar kept calling these “revolts” jokingly, but they totally were. I don’t think we had a project due until week 6.

All things considered, it was a good class. You learn about genome assembly, resequencing, RNA sequencing in the context of computation. The Stepik homeworks were way more CS heavy than the projects, honestly. They offered a ton of extra credit and lots of cool guest speakers if you’re into research. The projects aren’t that hard and the exams are just there to see if you’re paying attention. If you’re into research/bioinformatics, I’d suggest this as an introductory course. Not too difficult and pretty cool. This is coming from someone who learned Python concurrently with taking this course!

No doubt one of the most enjoyable classes I've taken at UCLA. The TA's are kind and understanding, and the lectures the professor and guest speakers gave are truly inspiring. Overall, I would highly recommend taking this class, regardless of whether you're interested in genetics/biology or not.

Super cool class if you're interested in the real world application of algorithms, even more so if you have a budding interest in bioinformatics. In each of the projects, you implement industry standard tools from scratch, which is super rewarding but challenging. There's no "dumbing" down going on in any aspect. The class has a large breadth and being familiar with CS180 concepts such as dynamic programming is really helpful. HWs were a few easy to medium LeetCode style problems, around 2-3 hours max. The real issue in this class are the projects. Not only are they insanely hard and time-consuming (although they do get easier throughout the quarter), the specs are super sparse and unhelpful. Constantly need to go to office hours to get clarification and direction. First two projects probably took me about 15 hours each. Exams are ridiculously easy though, almost identical to the practices they give out. Lectures are pretty useless. Textbook is surprisingly amazing, being incredibly readable.

Even though it was one of the most time-consuming classes I've taken at UCLA, learnt so much and got a lot of exposure in the industry. Would definitely recommend to anyone who likes algorithms!

Took this class for my Bioinformatics minor. This class is taught by two professors together: Prof. Eran Halperin and Prof Eskin. Honestly, this class is a mess.
1. Lecture. In the first few weeks, the two professors were teaching together during the lectures. As a result, the lectures became very unorganized and confusing, because they often got confused about which was the next slide or what concept to go through next. They also attempted to interact with students by asking questions. Obviously this didn't work out, because it would take at least 5 mins for someone to break the awkward silence and answer the question, then they'd spend another 10 mins going back and forth with the question if the answer was not what they wanted. I went to the lectures for the first 3 weeks, then decided they were purely a waste of time and stopped watching them.
2. Homework. There were no exams, so your grade solely depends on your hw. There were 7 hw in total, each of them contained 2-3 questions. 3 of the 7 hw contain coding questions, and you'll need to know Python or R to do them. The homework are not hard, each should take around 1-2 days. Be careful with the multiple-choice questions though, they don't give partial credits on these questions, and you could easily lose 30-50% of points if you got them wrong. I'll recommend checking your answers with a study buddy before submitting.
3. Discussion. The TAs went through the concepts and algorithms required for hw during their discussions. After the third week I stopped going to the lectures and used discussions only to do my hw, and I got full scores on most of them. Shoutout to Jingyuan for being an amazing TA. She explained everything clearly, and gave a lot of helpful advice during her OH.
Overall I don't recommend this class. The workload was not high, but I felt I learned nothing. The lectures were too disorganized to learn anything useful.

This course is honestly very interesting, but the amount of homework and projects can be overwhelming if you don't work ahead. Prof. Eskin taught the first half of the class, and he's eccentric in a fun way -- excited to be there and tries his best to engage with students. Unfortunately, this first half of the class is still a bit boring if you're not interested in sequencing & alignment -- Eskin goes through the material very thoroughly with state-of-the-art techniques, and so if that's your research interest, then you might find this half of the class to be useful. The homework is essentially a bunch of tedious (but fairly easy) leetcode questions, and the projects require you to work ahead. I've heard that you can get extensions whenever you need but with one lengthy project a week, getting behind on projects hurts you more than anything. The midterm covers this first half of the coruse and is extremely easy if you understand the concepts covered.

Note, you have to buy the $80 textbook so just be aware of that.

Good practice of algorithms and data structures.