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.

In my opinion, Majid is a good lecturer and cares about his students to do well in his class. So, I highly recommend you to attend lecture if you decide to take a class with him. You are also kind of forced to because he doesn't record or post lecture notes. I guess you could also just read the textbook or copy someone else's notes, but I preferred attending lecture and think attending was useful.

The TA's are ok at best; I appreciate them for trying. Homeworks can be pretty tough and long; I recommend starting them early. Also, the TAs are not allowed to give hints on them. The midterm was fair, but the final was quite the opposite. Fortunately, he curved. (idk what happened with the difficulty of the final skyrocketing, maybe Majid was just overconfident in our class lol).

Overall, although I did not get a super good grade and I'm glad this class is over because of how stressful and difficult it was for me at times, I don't think people should avoid taking it with Majid. He's solid for 180 because he can definitely teach and cares about his students doing well, which I think is the most important quality in a good professor. CS180 material is also just valuable knowledge to know.

The professor's lectures are very clear, however the homeworks tend to be challenging and long. The midterm and final (thankfully) are much easier than the homework. However, the final this quarter was kind of a curveball since it was far more challenging than the midterm. Overall, the class is not too bad provided you take the time to understand the algorithms. As for the TAs, they were not very helpful. While one of them at least put effort into helping, the other (I won't mention by name but all other students who took during this quarter know who this is) gave very passive-aggressive responses in email and Piazza. In short, the TAs weren't that helpful while the professor was far more helpful.

I felt the class was pretty fair. The lectures were dry but adequate. Expect to spend a lot of time on the homeworks. They were quite challenging.
The attendance policy was annoying. You had to attend every Zoom lecture and he would cold call people to make sure you were paying attention. This was annoying because it meant you couldn’t watch lectures with friends and it made it harder to attend lectures in a library.

Lectures were very clear and easy to follow, homework assignments were fun, exams were fair, and the professor was accommodating. I have a few small gripes with the course. First, grading was sometimes inaccurate, and I had to submit several regrade requests to fix errors. It felt like graders spent very little time looking at my solutions, which I don't know how to improve given the size of the class. I also thought the mandatory attendance policy was not helpful, and it made me feel like the professor did not trust me to learn the material without being forced to. Despite these gripes, it was a good course overall.