Majid is the GOAT. This has by far been my favorite class at UCLA, regardless of what grade I get at the end. Almost every lecture was engaging, and Majid keeps it entertaining with jokes. He only lectures for 1:30 instead of the full 2, so ending early is always nice. The homework usually took me about 5-6 hours to complete, and require a good understanding of the material so its def not easy. His midterm was easy (you should be fine by just practicing his sample and other previous midterms) but the final was a lot harder (as the reviews before me have made clear). Dynamic programming is definitely the hardest topic in this class, and I'd recommend a lot of practice with a variety of problems.
One criticism I have is that he covers a lot in class that may not be in the textbook (esp proofs). Make sure you attend all classes, and if you can't, get your hands on a good set of notes. Overall would 100% recommend.

He's such a CS legend. End of proof.

"YES PLEASE", a phrase I would hear over and over as Majid-GOD engaged every answer thrown his way... first things first: Sarrafzadeh is a godsent professor. No coding, just clear pseudocode and proof for everything. QED.

My mans teaches all the fundamental "meeehhtoohhDOOOHHlogies" and cares more that you understand the material than perform for that A, although his midterm/HW grading is VERY lenient and easy. (Note: Final was a lot harder though; think of 6 questions, 4 related to class material and 2 Leetcode Hards w/ mean ~57%). Don't worry about the final during the qtr. though because his curve was nice.

I recommend taking this class in the fall or before technical interviews, for it helped a lot. I'm gonna save my breadth and refrain from talking about the structure of the class, it's very reasonable, clear and obvious within the first 2 lectures. HW's can get long, but I was always able to do day before and in no way am I a "CS-god" like many of my peers. Go to every class because it's actually interesting, and 10/10 use to textbook to study & learn. I got the mean on the final, but copped the A because this class was actually very useful/interesting and did well the other 10 weeks.

Majid if you're reading this please connect with me on LinkedIn my dawg. I'm gonna tell my kids he was Steve Jobs.

Off the bat; if you can, take this class with Prof Sarrafzadeh in person. And it's a fair bet to say that he's the best so far at UCLA for CS 180.
I took it with him online and well, there are too many challenges that he faces with regards to the online structure. You can't ask clarifying questions during the online exams, you can't ask him questions easily during lectures (and he keeps the chat off), and you can't "hang around" in office hours to learn from other people's questions cause if no questions are left he'll just shut down the zoom link (this is from my experience, at least).

In the bright event that no one has to ever consider taking CS 180 online after 2020, here's my review of the class:

Content:
Hella useful. The course content is really really practical, specially if you want to land in the industry. The algorithmic paradigms he'll use are here to stay for a while and the way you'll have to force yourself to ask clarifying questions in the course will be an immense boost during an interview. Plus dynamic programming is your not-so-brute-but-totally-brute-force way out of a lot of hard problems that an interviewer can throw at you. Basically, CS 32 data structures and CS 180 algorithms are your best friends for an interview. From personal experience, I landed a big-n internship thanks to the greedy and DP paradigms.
Will Prof Sarrafzadeh teach it to that level? No. He'll give you the paradigm, and if you do the hw questions and tackle them for hours on end, you will get a certain amount of intuition. It's really the only way; practice and practice.

Exams:
They will be fair. If you have a strong understanding of the algorithm proofs done in class and have practiced dynamic programming well enough, you'll be fine. Revise the homework, the proofs, and the questions he's done in class. And actually rewrite the class notes religiously, it helps SO MUCH for retention and will save you precious week 10 time when you start preparing.

Curve:
None. :-|. I've even heard he's down curved this time and have 88 and 89% raw scores a B. This should be online specific though; normally he'd give a decent curve I'd assume.

Book:
Read it. If you don't understand something from lecture, you'll find it here. If you understand everything from lecture, you'll find a great revision here.

All that said, this is a very important class and a very interesting one. But also very time consuming. 6 questions only in the homework, but each one took me 4-5 hours. It'll be worth it at the end though.

Shoutout to Lionel for being all round amazing, enthusiastic, and awesome, and for doing all he could to make it as less stressful as possible. Oh and, shoutout to Sai and Evan too for having such awesome office hours! (I didn't interact much with the others haha).

CS 180 is definitely one of the harder CS classes out there, but Majid teaches it well. He does have a bit of a sarcastic lecturing style, but I liked that we did not write any code for assignments and just had to worry about the general approach we would take for a problem. Albeit, exams are very challenging with 'creative problems' (think Leetcode Mediums) that require a lot of critical thinking. However, Majid likes to throw in examples that he briefly mentioned during lecture on exams, so I was able to get a lot of points even if I didn't do as well on the creative problems. Also, show up to Lionel's discussions if he's still the head TA. He's the goat.

I never attended class and used the textbook for everything and got an A. However, I also got some notes from friends and on each test there were a couple questions from the lectures verbatim. So either attend lecture or have a friend give you the notes and you should do well. Tests were also super easy.

Great content of the class, very useful and helpful algos and methods of thinking. Basically most of what you need for software engineering internship (interviews).
As for the prof and the class structure, the prof is not bad. He's ok, explains stuff well but sometimes is unclear. He doesn't post notes which was kind of lame. The homeworks were weirdly tough imo, the exams/midterms aren't as tough.
Cool class content overall, prof and structure is average-good.

This class was one of the toughest classes I've taken so far. 6 homework assignments worth 25% total, each of which took 6-10 hours/week. Midterm (35%) and Final (39.5%) were both tough, with 2-3 of the problems being lecture examples repeated, and the last couple being super varied and usually very tough. Exams are closed-book, and the averages are pretty low. Majid is a decent prof in my opinion, though his explanations can often be unclear, and to some, he might talk a bit bluntly. This class is tough, but if you understand the material, especially dynamic programming, and grind LeetCode during it, it isn't the worst thing in the world.

Double it and give it to the next person.

He is one of the great instructors in the UCLA. The concepts are hard though and it's time consuming to learn and figure out how to use them in the short amount of time in a quarter. I think the workload would be the modify to something a litter lighter than what it is right now.
There are 6 homework and worth 25% of the grade, you also get 0.5% for filling out course evaluation, midterm is 35% of the grade and final is 39.5% of the grade. Homework are usually 6 questions but they are time consuming to solve them. The class is online and he recorded but the record will remain in the BruinLearn for only 2 days after that session of the class which is a little bit stressful but I think he has some strategy to make his students more organize and detail oriented. The midterm was online this quarter but usually would be in person if he can get the room, it was 5 questions on the midterm and I think each has worth of 20 with make it total 100 points. Also, the final was in person, it had 6 questions and it worth total of 100 points, and both exams where closed book, closed notes, no cheat sheet, nothing allowed at all.
There is no slides, he uses his note for lecturing and you need to take as the same pace of his teaching which is make it a little hard, I always prefer slides.
I recommend his class though, it's hard concepts in this class but they are useful and I like his strategy of teaching, the best part of that was he doesn't depend on your previous knowledge on CS32, and all the new concepts that needs some explanation of CS32 or math 61 he is teaching them again.