Overall the class is great! Despite he didn't go very deep into metrization theorems and fundamental groups, Professor Sharifi really explains concepts and proofs well. He's midterm was okay, but the final was quite hard.

I'll start by saying that I thought the professor himself was a pretty great professor. He was clear, thorough, and always welcomes questions. Out of the professors I've had so far, he is definitely one of the better professors I've had.

Now onto the bad part. Every quarter I feel like I've taken the hardest upper division math class yet, but this takes the cake so far. The most difficult part of the class was the midterms and finals. Granted, I took this during lockdown online, so if you're taking the class in person your experience may be different. Each midterm took approximately 12 hours (with breaks, and 8 hours without breaks. I timed it), and final is about 1.5 times longer. The exams don't actually have too many questions (5~6 for midterm, ~9 for final), but each question is well crafted to be entirely ungoogleable (as it should be) and very difficult. The class distribution for exams this year seemed to largely be a cluster of strong students getting 88%+, some students getting 70%~88%, and some getting below 40%.

To the profressor's credit, he acknowledged that the exams are designed to be very difficult, and that he gets the impression the class had a group of particularly strong students, and that he would take that into account for the other students (positively i.e. not curving against them). I was consistently in the upper-middling group (~85%), averaged about 90% on all the homework and managed an A.

tl;dr: professor and his teaching is great, but his exams are not so great

The professor is great and he really cares about his students. One of the best math professors I've had at UCLA.

This is for 110BH in winter 22. Sharifi is a good professor with engaging lectures and willing to accommodate students by giving extensions on homework and finals. However, the homework, while contains fantastic questions, was difficult and there is no answers online. The Final was even more difficult( mean 123, high 173 out of 200) but I did feel that I learned a lot from the final. For instance, the final was the first time which I used the Nullstellensatz to calculate radicals of an ideal. I had a 80 average for the homework and midterm, and I barely passed the final, and i received a A-, so it is clearly that the professor recognized the difficulty of the assessment. Overall, recommended, but be ready to put a lot of effort into it.