Overall not the best experience I’ve had.

She forced international students to take the midterm at midnight and was pretty rude when being asked to reconsider her decision.

Also be warned that she DOWN curved people, something she never mentioned any time throughout the quarter. Honestly speaking, I’ve never seen any instructor doing things like this, especially during the difficult times.

I don’t even want to comment on her class contents... Things are pretty superficial, and though obviously she tried her best, she was unable to explain the concepts or answer our questions very well.

During all the lectures in the class, she did okay in explaining most of the concepts. However, there were times when she expected us to know stuff from other languages when most of the class had only taken cs31 and 32. There were also long pauses in some of the lectures and I don't really think she knew what she was saying half the time

NEVER TAKE CLASSES WITH HER, NEVER!
赶紧跑！

Rising junior and this is my first grade below an A I have received at UCLA. And I have taken many other harder classes. The content of this class is not difficult at all and the professor does a decent job teaching it. My issue is with the TA's and the grading. The TA's never took the time to grade any of the quizzes before the next exam and no solutions are provided so it was really hard to learn from your mistakes. They never post solutions for any exams either. The most annoying part was on the midterm where many questions depended on the previous part and if you got an answer even so slightly wrong on the first part, the rest will automatically be 0 no matter if you got the correct concept. The grading for this was complete bull. Not only that but they refused to tell me what I did wrong for any of my questions on the midterm so I was unable to learn from my mistakes for the final. Even after getting a 98% on my final, I ended the class with a A- because of the shitty grading scheme for the midterm. Honestly, take this class where it is 100% homework grade. The homework for this class is only worth 5%.

Ghaforyfard was not a very helpful professor, but the good thing with how the class is structured, is that all the assignments are pre-written and pretty interesting (bomb lab for example). I stopped going to lecture pretty early as they were very dry and not very helpful, and just using the book and online resources was enough to do well on the assignments. Her tests on the other hand were pretty difficult, and you really need to study and do practice problems (this really helps) to do well on them. Hope this helps!

pretty easy b/c it was online, gave ample time on exams, reasonable amount of hw, only problem was her directions and questions were sometimes unclear.

Dont know what i learnt in the 8 weeks. No solutions to the midterms. No slides at all. No class notes. Only OneNote. Not organized at all. I hate OneNote so much.

Took this class in the Summer of 2020, thinking since it was offered online I could take advantage of my Summer. Big mistake. Professor Ghaforyfard assigns weekly readings of the extremely dense textbook, which most people would think to just be supplemental, but no: if you don't do the readings, you will be instantly lost in what is going on. Also, due to her Electrical Engineering background, she will go on extremely long tangents about things that don't help at all, and if anything just further confuse you. Classes were very boring. As far as the labs go, the bomb lab is the most time-consuming but atleast you may actually learn how to do that one from class. The attack and malloc labs, on the other hand, were near impossible with the lackluster lectures (especially the malloc lab). Oh and the tests are anything but easy. Seriously just take this class with another professor.

Professor Ghaforyfard tries hard in her lectures, but she is not too good at explaining concepts. During summer, we didn't cover anything about floating points because she just didn't have enough time. The projects are standard CS33 projects and the slides are the standard CS33 slides. Our final was ridiculously hard, she tested a bunch of 32-bit questions when our class was mainly focused on 64-bit the whole quarter. In the end, I feel like everyone did pretty badly, so she curved the whole class and almost everyone I knew got an A or A+.
Overall, she is not very good at explaining, but she was pretty easy of a grader, so I still think you can take her, but just a lot of self studying required.