Avoid at all cost!!!

I took this class in Winter 2022, and it was really different from what you'd expect from a class. The class is entirely run by the TA. I didn't even see the professor once. Also, I don't know why we have to take this class. It's literally useless. You'll find that the projects aren't too hard, but you can get into trouble by running into 1000 problems with their outdated software. I had Samuel Lee for this class, who was extremely helpful and lenient. I talked to my friends from the other sections, and they mentioned that they were simply given the spec and instructed to read it themselves and do the projects. Sam studies all the projects and picks out parts that he thinks will be difficult for us, and he legit made an entire slide deck going over difficult concepts and how we should do the projects. He's also super reasonable, so if you go to his office hours and talk to him, he's likely to help you out. I give the class a 7/10 cause the class sucked, but the overall experience wasn't bad.

You should expect 4 labs. The first two labs are fairly easy. The third lab might wreck you, but if you go to office hours you can survive. The fourth lab is a project of your choice (HINT: CHOOSE AN EASY PROJECT GUYS).

Very bad experience. The worst part of the class are the exams. Although he curves almost a letter grade above your actual grade for the exams, it is still not enough and not fair. About half of the exam questions are very difficult/novel problems. Majid's teaching style does not work for most students. He uses no slides and no notes are posted. He simply speaks and draws maybe 2 or 3 diagrams. You must write furiously to get all of the information during lecture. The lectures are not recorded and he refuses to record them. He gives small hints for what can be on the exam for like 30sec and sometimes those things will be a whole problem on the exam. He is not nice outside of class.

Majid is a good professor. I wouldn't say he's godlike or anything, but he's definitely the choice to make for 180. He comes off as a little sarcastic and abrasive at first, but throughout the quarter you can really see that he means well and cares about student learning. His lectures are very methodical: he takes a lot of time introducing problems, making everything clear, and illustrating the problem solving process in detail. Usually he does only 1 or 2 problems each lecture. This means he only goes through a few examples for every topic.

Homeworks and exams were pretty challenging for me. As someone who rarely studied the material outside lecture, I had a lot of trouble doing the problems without help. For most normal/average students, doing well in the class will probably involve reading the textbook and doing extra practice regularly. And if you procrastinate on homework, expect to pull some all-nighters to finish.

I'm guessing exam averages were unusually high this quarter or something, because he did not curve at all. In fact, because he gives so few +/- grades, quite a few people got curved down (e.g. 88% -> B). Sad times. Overall, I'd still recommend. Just remember that there is no way around putting in the work for developing the skill set of this class, regardless of how good of a lecturer the professor is.

Probably the worst computer science professor I have had the displeasure of having so far. He consistently ends class early every day (by an hour or more), despite not covering the full materials required for homework and exams. On exam days, he is overly aggressive about turning over our exams to where we can write our names... (it literally just has the name to fill out and number of questions, nothing else). He forces you to take pictures of your exam to upload to gradescope using the god awful UCLA wifi in Young, and imposes an arbitrary time limit of 8 minutes to do so, despite technical issues, if you are not able for any reason, he decided its reasonable to assume you are cheating. Even worse, he takes the the assigned time for exams and reduces it to two hours, and only announces this decision days before the final. He also does not record lectures for some asinine reason. You're telling me that you can't even commit the full lecture time to lecture us, but he also can't post recording in a BruinCast equipped room? I have showed up to a couple lectures, and to say that the abysmal attendance rate would be worse with recordings being posted... is optimistic. He also tells you that some topics will DEFINITELY be on the exam, but they rarely are. The homeworks are completely unrelated to exam material and are of unreasonable difficulty (yeah, thanks Majid for giving us an optional homework 7 in which NONE of the topics are on the final). Also expect the homeworks to take 5+ hours, with provided solutions being incorrect (you would think they would try to go through the psuedo-code on the examples at the very least). Besides Vincent, the TAs this quarter were basically useless. I would describe Majid as angry, lazy, incompetent, and unfair. Although I enjoyed the topics of this class, I can not in good faith recommend this dog shit professor. No idea how this professor has even close to a 3.0 rating, I would say that a 1.0 rating would be fair, although that would be erring on the side of optimistic.

The professor was very nice in class but arrogant and a bit irresponsible after class. It is disappointing and truly a waste of time when you found out he failed to make to his office hours (without even noticing the class in advance). The midterm needs proof of correctness and time complexity analysis but the problem statements did not explicitly specify, and I got lots of points deducted just because of those ambiguous requirements, and the professor refuses to admit such ambiguity. The grading scheme i think is pretty lenient at least you have some stuff in terms of algo, proof, and time complexity. I nearly bullshitted one question and got 15/20 but only got 10/20 without any proof/complexity analysis just because i thought the problem does not require for them(((( Overall the material is very useful but the experience and grading sucks.

Majid is clearly super experienced with teaching this course. He’s very engaging and funny without trying to be. When explaining solutions, he likes to go over wrong approaches before arriving at the final correct one so it really sticks in your head why other approaches were wrong. Homework was almost all based on textbook problems and took maybe 7-9 hours each week - find study groups for this course! Midterm was almost all questions we could find from test banks (but he realized that soon after sooo), and the final was REALLY tough, but a bit more generously curved. I found my TA to be quite helpful even though each discussion had less than 5 students attending at a time. Concepts in this class are crucial for job interviews so I highly recommend attending. I think Majid for 180 is the best choice, regardless of what grade I got.

Brief summary for those too lazy to read the essay length reviews: Professor is terrible and unhelpful and he does not provide any lecture notes, recordings or other materials. He does not cover content clearly, and refuses to answer clarifying questions regarding the ambiguous and unclear exam problems. The grading (exams specifically) is wildly inconsistent and inaccurate, and the graders refuse to honor valid regrade requests.

This is a review for CS M148 with Majid. If it wasn't for Lionel being an awesome TA, this class would be completely worthless. Take M146 with Sankararaman instead. M148 is a lot easier than M146, but you don't actually learn the concepts and then get blindsided by the exam which covers material never discussed in lectures. The first two projects were easy, basically given to you by the TAs in discussions. The third project was way too vague. I learned a lot of the same stuff in more depth in M146.

Grading: 15% Homeworks (Doable in < 2 hrs)
40% Projects (Easy project 0, and 3 projects over the course of the quarter)
40% Exam
5% Participation

Fuck this class. It's fucking useless.