After having taken CS 180 in Winter 2024, I felt that Majid is fine; he's not all that great as a professor, but not bad either.

In contrast to last quarter, where the lectures were in-person but early in the morning, this quarter his lectures were in the afternoon and recorded, allowing for a bit more flexibility in terms of learning the course material since we didn't necessarily need to attend the lectures live, and can replay lecture recordings if any of us were still confused about the lecture topics after the end of each Zoom session. Additionally, I think Majid is very knowledgeable of the material and goes into lots of detail on how each algorithm works and how to prove and understand them. While his homeworks were very difficult, they were still manageable as long as we started early and consulted the TAs for hints whenever we could.

However, if you want a professor who gives reasonable exams, especially for such a crucial class like Algorithms and Complexity, you may want to think twice before taking it with Majid. When we took our midterm, it was online because he could not secure a room, and it's likely that plenty of students may have found ways to cheat without getting noticed by him or the TAs. Although the final exam was better organized because it was in-person and had a longer time limit than last quarter's final, it was still quite challenging and covered some algorithms that may not have been fully touched in-depth (or just barely covered) during the course. It especially didn't help that most of the time, you also need to provide a corresponding proof of correctness/optimality and runtime complexity analysis, which puts a further time crunch when combined with the amount of time you must spend thinking about each exam prompt.

All in all, I do think that Majid is good if you want an in-depth look at plenty of algorithms through a challenging but fun course. Nevertheless, you may need to be a bit wary of how he writes and organizes his exams, especially when you may never know what types of topics he will consider in his midterm and final.

Majid clearly has no interest in teaching this course, as his lectures are constantly either missing or truncated after 40 minutes. Not sure how one can expect to learn the fundamentals of 2-D DP in only two hours of total lecture content, but apparent Majid thinks this is a reasonable expectation. Homeworks are valuable, but quite difficult. The difficulty is fine, although some easier problems to assure fundamental understanding would've been nice. Going from lectures to HWs are like going from 0 to 100. A few weeks into this quarter, I realized Majid's actual lectures would be of no use, so I ended up using the textbook and YouTube as a substitution for the remainder of the class. I felt as if I got way more out of this than the actual lecture, and many peers ended up following the same. Lastly, his tests are an abomination. For the midterm, not only was it online, meaning he failed to secure a spot after 6 weeks of a promised deadline, the entire process was extremely unorganized. You had 15 minutes to solve each problem, including a full algorithm and rigorous proof, making it impossible to actually develop a novel solution if you haven't seen the problem before. That to me is such a flaw with an advanced algorithms class, as the test cannot accurately test your learning but your pattern matching. This class constantly showcased the disconnect between the professor and the students. Majid has no intention of teaching this class, being putting into a stronghold by the CS department it seems like, and I have no intention of ever taking a class with him again. Do future students a favor and alleviate Majid's pain by removing him from this course. Maybe beg Eggert to see if he can teach 180 instead.

Professor Sarrafzadeh lectures were well paced and felt mostly clear. It gave just enough information to complete the homework while leaving room for students to think about it.

I loved the course material. I really think that I learned a lot and I think this class taught me to think in a different way. Definitely one of my favorite courses at UCLA. Professor Sarrafzadeh is also good at explaining, where the concepts he taught made since. Only thing is that since there are no slides and his own notes are sparse, there is a gap between getting a grasp of the concept and being able to put it concisely into words that I think can be improved on.

This class is hard and is a time-crunch and there's no going around that. There's a lot of studying unless you're mathematically-inclined and are really good at algorithm Leetcode style questions. Majid is a good professor, although I wish his notes were more organized and wish he'd upload them. Because he taught the class online this quarter, he recorded the lecture and posted it. Although he left the recording up only for a few days, it was EXTREMELY helpful to rewatch and understand his methodologies again. The textbook is pretty good, although it's really confusing to me because of all the math notations and the proofs are kind of obscure to me. I found the homework to be really challenging, but mileage may vary (I'm not very mathematically and algorithmically inclined). The midterm was really difficult but I did pretty well (93%, 72% avg). I'm pretty worried about the final though but we'll see (update the avg was 64.36% and i got an 87.5%)

I decided to switch back to math of computation to graduate early after this professor

I didn't take this class in F23 (I took it in F22), but reading all the recent reviews made me want to write mine. Everything that has been said about Majid this year is not a one-time thing: Majid is a complete asshole who hates his students. Like F23, in F22 Majid refused to record lectures, never used the entire lecture time for the lecture, was very rude and arrogant both during lectures and when answering emails, and set his office hours at 8 AM and never even showed up to his own OH. Additionally, the midterm average for our quarter was roughly a 68, and he refused to change the final's format despite the TA strikes. The one saving grace of our quarter was that we had a very goated TA (Lionel Levine), everything else about the class was just simply awful. Tl;Dr: Majid is an arrogant asshole who hates his students, and the most recent quarter was no exception. DO NOT TAKE 180 WITH MAJID.

The exam is extremely hard. The average is like 60ish.

The hw is time-consuming, each taking about 4-6 hours straight work.

The professor is good at the content. However, he seems to have more important stuff to do rather than caring his students.

i'll try to be concise.

1. Lecturing

majid is a good lecturer. it would be nice if he cared more about it and took up the full time. two lectures were wasted with TA review sessions (he doesn't show up), he skipped Bellman Ford (altering the syllabus to do so), and he cancelled a Tuesday (of Thanksgiving) because he went the full lecture time T/Th of the previous week and went through DP (way too quickly).

tldr; he's good at teaching, but he doesn't care and use the full class time.

2. Grading

this was an unclear point throughout the class; in particular, the way the final was handled was abysmal. There are grading mistakes on every HW and exam -- you will have to submit regrades. In response to Q6 on the final, which many students emailed TAs about, he had a strict rubric and would not consider any other correct algorithms. This was his copypasta email response to students who contacted him regarding it:

We reviewed your explanation: no additional points will be given.

despite clearly not reviewing any of them (these emails were sent within a span of 2 minutes to everyone requesting a regrade).

tldr; poor grading, poor schemes, downright incorrect, and highly uncoordinated.

3. Conclusion

Majid is a good lecturer, and I'd like to believe he's a nice person (deep down), but he truly does not care about this course or the students, and it really shows in how short he is with us and how he handles the running of the class and his lectures. He clearly would rather be doing something else.

I don't regret taking the course with him. I only wish he were better about this stuff, because he really is a good lecturer and I thoroughly enjoyed his lectures, despite them being 8 AM.

Terrible class organization, lectures were just a worse version of reading the textbook, lackluster communication about final grades.

Just take it with someone else if you don't want to hate algorithms