Great professor :) He cares so much about student struggles, and is on our side. Tests and homeworks were fair, and homeworks were 50% of the grade, so the tests didn't seem so stressful. Take him if you can

grading scheme:

hws (4 of them) - 50%
midterm - 25%
final - 25%

assignments are easy, the professor can't explain concepts well. If you only care about the grade, I would say go for it. If you want to learn anything other than the things already in your textbook, please avoid him.

The grading scheme is:
Homework: 50%
Midterm: 50%
Final: 50%
I think that given the online format, professor did a great job of teaching this class. For lecture, he would write his notes on an Ipad as he lecture. His handwritting can be hard to read and the lecture isn't really that engaging but he would take time to answer all questions that was raised. Although I think that he really explained it clear enough conceptually, I would suggest reading the textbook as supplement as it may have some finer points and example that may help you in solving the homework.
For homework, I think it really takes sometime to solve it, for me it took me about 5 - 10 hours in order to come up with a solution, even then, I still sometime miss some cases and get points docked because my proof is either incomplete or I overlooked a possible case.
For exams, we were given 24 hours for midterm and 48 hours for final. In my opinion, the exams were way harder than the homework. I took the entire time working on it and even then I still barely passing that exam.

A very well-intentioned dude, but exams were TOUGH.

i mostly agree with what everyone else said. lectures + textbook were more than enough to cover everything u need for exams. lectures are so-so but usually good enough. textbook was very useful. exams were TOUGH. i spent 20 hours on a 24 hour midterm and 13 on a 24 hour final. LIKE WITHOUT PROCRASTINATING OR ANYTHING. exams required a lot of creative approaches, but TAs were very nice with grading HWs 1,2,3, midterm. Final and hw4 grading were rough but not unreasonable (actually idk abt this tbh lol u could argue that grading was sorta mean)
homework took maybe 14 hours each, but theres only 4 hw assignments so its managable.
grading:
(40%) Homeworks: we plan to have 4 homework assignments. (30%) Midterm exam
(30%) Final exam

Watching Hsieh stops talking for a whole minute and reading questions in the chat 20+ times in one lecture is torturing. I'm learning by book because of this and his accent. HWs and exams usually have 4 problems, 3 do-able but 1 hardcore. I found some of the problems on leetcode as hard. Nevertheless, the curve is generous. The class averaged 59 in final and he add 3-5 points to everyone's total grades. I get from B+ to just over A.

So before the course evaluations are due, you will be graded extremely leniently; and that will be HW 1-3 plus the midterm. After that, with the final (our median = 58) and HW 4, you will be crushed. Some of the problems on those were in the area of research, and this class will not prepare you for them well enough. The teacher can't teach and is impossible to follow. I am starting to think that this department cannot teach at all (maybe that makes sense considering who is the head of the department). The grading was just abysmal (and I truly believe that was by design): inconsistent, extremely delayed, no feedback...
Overall, this is just an utter embarrassment of a class!
If you have to take this section, make use of the book, YouTube, and such.
Otherwise, AVOID!!!

This class can be tough. The problem sets usually aren't all too bad - they mainly are just slight modifications on problems presented in lecture. The real problem with this class is the difficulty of the midterm/final. They were 24 hrs and take home, however they took the entire 24 hours to complete, and almost all the problems required very novel ideas, albeit using some basic concepts covered in lecture. All in all, an important class to take and algorithms are supposed to be tough, however I wish they could have been presented in a more engaging way and that the exams would contain the questions based on lectures while the problem sets would give us time to explore developing novel ideas to solve problems.

Overall, the class concepts and algorithms taught are definitely useful and can aid you a lot with future coding interviews. However, the class was just poorly structured as personally I was doing well on all assignments until the final exam. There were also many student compilations with the final regrade requests with solutions not being able to get credit, and grading where perhaps > 90% students got no credit before regrades. The class is definitely useful and Cho is clear at explaining algorithms.

Even though the class was hard, I do think it was taught in a fair manner. The homework was not easy but not impossible and I think everything in the class was well structured. He gives many examples and always answers questions no matter how long it will take. He was very considerate given the COVID situation and was the TA's were also very on top of commenting on Piazza.

The concepts in this class were hard but Professor Hsieh did his best to teach them and was never impatient when students asked multiple questions (sometimes repetitive ones). He is also very nice and extremely considerate for this special quarter. Whenever a student asks a question he also never fails to respond and say "thank you" afterwards which I thought was really cute haha. Not only did he immediately say it shouldn't be a problem to make our finals optional if you pass/no pass but he also extended the final from 24 hours to 72 hours to accommodate more students. There were only 4 homeworks for the entire quarter and although some of the questions were challenging they were doable. If you go to the TA's and Professor's OH they are more than willing to help you with it! Shoutout to Hadley Black for also being an awesome TA :))