Professor
Rafail Ostrovsky
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2018 - I would say CS 180 is definitely one of the most useful and interesting classes I've ever taken at UCLA. HOWEVER, as for the professor himself, I would say he's not helpful at all. I stopped going to lectures after like 2nd or 3rd week bc his lectures suck. And since he strictly followed the textbook I just decided to study the textbook myself instead of wasting time attending lectures(btw the textbook is great as it provides you an overall skeleton of how different algorithmic paradigms work, and gives you abundant examples showing how to apply those different algorithms). The workload is chill. You only have around 5 hw problems every week. However, some of the problems can be really hard, even impossible to do on ur own. But anyways there are solutions available online and it seems that as long as you write something on each problem you'll get 100... The midterm was hard with average around 40%. The final on the other hand was much better(at least compared with the midterm).
Winter 2018 - I would say CS 180 is definitely one of the most useful and interesting classes I've ever taken at UCLA. HOWEVER, as for the professor himself, I would say he's not helpful at all. I stopped going to lectures after like 2nd or 3rd week bc his lectures suck. And since he strictly followed the textbook I just decided to study the textbook myself instead of wasting time attending lectures(btw the textbook is great as it provides you an overall skeleton of how different algorithmic paradigms work, and gives you abundant examples showing how to apply those different algorithms). The workload is chill. You only have around 5 hw problems every week. However, some of the problems can be really hard, even impossible to do on ur own. But anyways there are solutions available online and it seems that as long as you write something on each problem you'll get 100... The midterm was hard with average around 40%. The final on the other hand was much better(at least compared with the midterm).
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2024 - The lectures were very disorganized with no slides, posted notes, or recording. The professor would write down fragments of thoughts on the board; throughout the lecture, students would often end up asking clarifying questions which would force him to spend a huge amount of lecture time just repeating himself, which means it was really hard for people who did understand things he said the first time to not get distracted (and subsequently lost once he does move on to a new topic). The syllabus originally said we'd have a midterm and a final; we ended up having a take-home midterm and a final, with the midterm score being ignored if we do better on the final. There was never any practice problems or homework, so we went into both exams completely unaware of what level of understanding we would be asked to demonstrate. (Since the midterm was take-home, it wasn't an accurate representation of the difficulty of the final.) The professor himself clearly underestimated how hard the final would be, since he seemed surprised that nobody finished early. I spent the couple of weeks after the final terrified that I wouldn't make the curve, since I genuinely had no idea how well I'd done compared to other people. The professor also promised the exam would have some multiple choice or definition questions, which was misleading: there was no multiple choice at all and only one or two definitions which were just a small part of much more involved questions.
Winter 2024 - The lectures were very disorganized with no slides, posted notes, or recording. The professor would write down fragments of thoughts on the board; throughout the lecture, students would often end up asking clarifying questions which would force him to spend a huge amount of lecture time just repeating himself, which means it was really hard for people who did understand things he said the first time to not get distracted (and subsequently lost once he does move on to a new topic). The syllabus originally said we'd have a midterm and a final; we ended up having a take-home midterm and a final, with the midterm score being ignored if we do better on the final. There was never any practice problems or homework, so we went into both exams completely unaware of what level of understanding we would be asked to demonstrate. (Since the midterm was take-home, it wasn't an accurate representation of the difficulty of the final.) The professor himself clearly underestimated how hard the final would be, since he seemed surprised that nobody finished early. I spent the couple of weeks after the final terrified that I wouldn't make the curve, since I genuinely had no idea how well I'd done compared to other people. The professor also promised the exam would have some multiple choice or definition questions, which was misleading: there was no multiple choice at all and only one or two definitions which were just a small part of much more involved questions.
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