Designed two sets of tests with one easier for domestic students and one harder for international students?
What a good strategy!

OK this review may destroy all the good impressions you got from the other reviews, but I have to tell u I am telling ONE HUNDRED PERCENT TRUTH!!!!!

Dr. Sarrafzadeh clearly knows the contents of the course very well because I have to admit his lecture contents are acceptable. I enjoyed his lectures because he always tried his best to introduce the algorithms and lead us through the steps. As other reviews mentioned, he came with a bit of "sarcasm," and this really made his lectures intriguing. His homework questions were fair considering the time I spent working on them and the TAs' generous grading policy. There are usually 6 questions per problem set and I spent roughly 6h to finish each week. His midterm was comparatively easy, and I got almost 100 out of it. Until now u are seeing positive comments right? Get prepared here comes the bullshit part.

Note, I got almost 100% before I took the final exam. But for the final, he designed, like the midterm, 2 sets of problems, one for domestic students and one for international students (there were 2 exam time windows, one at 8am, one at 8pm). I took the 8pm test and got 70/100. There were 23 students (most of which from Asia) who took the 8pm final, and we had a group chat. I checked with most students in the group chat and found out 70/100 was actually a pretty decent grade because most of my peers got a score around 60-65.

Now you may think the average for the final should be around 65 and Majid would curve up the grade . Well you are wrong, or I have to say more than wrong. Later I received a B grade and he told us he would not curve because the final grade was "unusually high". As a result, I asked the Dean for help and got the distribution of the final grades. It turned out domestic time window got a mean of around 88, and international 78. I could not figure out why was the median 78 given that I had already spoken to most of my classmates taking the 8pm test and they received scores around 65??? He gave out 62/180ish A's and it turned out almost none of them were from the 8pm test. He insisted that the 2 tests had same difficulty level, and international students did poor on the exam simply because they did not master the materials well. But I got 100/100 before the final and I still screwed the final to such an extent. So I personally do not think he offered a fair set of tests.

"WHAT A GOOD ALGORITHM," quoting one of my classmates

Boring class.

Took it with TA Sam Lee
definitely made it easier for me!
GOAT

This professor does not give a shit about the students at all. No matter what he says or did throughout the quarter, he does not care at all and you should NOT take it with him - AVOID AT ALL COSTS. He emphasizes understanding the content over memorization and that as long as you make sure to review his lectures, complete the projects, complete the homeworks, and study the sparse resources he gave us (1 practice exam that he didn't write), you will do well in this class.

This is a complete and utter lie. I aced the homeworks and projects alike as I understood all the content he went over in class, and then this horrible, uncaring professor goes ahead and on an exam worth 40% of our grade, puts questions that have us doing calculations he never even mentioned in class, says that the exam will be as long as or shorter than the practice exam in terms of number of questions, and then goes ahead and makes it much longer, and only gives us 90 minutes for the exam (which is worth the same as a final exam which is generally 3 hours and gives us half the time).

This professor hands down does not give shit about the students. If it wasn't for the TAs seeing how shitty the professor was and making sure to give out extra points, a lot of people would be leaving the class with Cs SOLELY because of the final. I have never had such a hypocritical and uncaring professor at UCLA and I feel disgusted. Even Eggert makes sure to at least curve the class at the end so even if you get screwed by the scores, you have a chance to end up with a better grade than you expected. I know some people will downvote this answer, and I can tell you it will likely be those students who took CSM146 as they were already taught the content on the questions that Majid never taught us and thus easily aced the final (Side note, it is because these students did well that Majid ended up not curving because in his inane and broken logic, its fair to put questions only those with previous experience in an ML course could answer).

In conclusion, this professor is truly terrible and avoid taking ANY class with him if possible (his CS 180 class was dogshit as well: he down curved the class after explicitly saying he wouldn't).

I took this class in Winter 2022, and it was really different from what you'd expect from a class. The class is entirely run by the TA. I didn't even see the professor once. Also, I don't know why we have to take this class. It's literally useless. You'll find that the projects aren't too hard, but you can get into trouble by running into 1000 problems with their outdated software. I had Samuel Lee for this class, who was extremely helpful and lenient. I talked to my friends from the other sections, and they mentioned that they were simply given the spec and instructed to read it themselves and do the projects. Sam studies all the projects and picks out parts that he thinks will be difficult for us, and he legit made an entire slide deck going over difficult concepts and how we should do the projects. He's also super reasonable, so if you go to his office hours and talk to him, he's likely to help you out. I give the class a 7/10 cause the class sucked, but the overall experience wasn't bad.

You should expect 4 labs. The first two labs are fairly easy. The third lab might wreck you, but if you go to office hours you can survive. The fourth lab is a project of your choice (HINT: CHOOSE AN EASY PROJECT GUYS).

"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.

Majid is a good professor. I wouldn't say he's godlike or anything, but he's definitely the choice to make for 180. He comes off as a little sarcastic and abrasive at first, but throughout the quarter you can really see that he means well and cares about student learning. His lectures are very methodical: he takes a lot of time introducing problems, making everything clear, and illustrating the problem solving process in detail. Usually he does only 1 or 2 problems each lecture. This means he only goes through a few examples for every topic.

Homeworks and exams were pretty challenging for me. As someone who rarely studied the material outside lecture, I had a lot of trouble doing the problems without help. For most normal/average students, doing well in the class will probably involve reading the textbook and doing extra practice regularly. And if you procrastinate on homework, expect to pull some all-nighters to finish.

I'm guessing exam averages were unusually high this quarter or something, because he did not curve at all. In fact, because he gives so few +/- grades, quite a few people got curved down (e.g. 88% -> B). Sad times. Overall, I'd still recommend. Just remember that there is no way around putting in the work for developing the skill set of this class, regardless of how good of a lecturer the professor is.

I think where Majid's lectures shine is his focus on giving you a good theoretical grasp of the material without being bogged down in the details. Implementation, corner cases, etc. you'll have to figure out yourself if you really care, but Majid just wants to know whether or not you understand when to apply different algorithmic paradigms.

There were some underwhelming parts to this class, however. It wasn't as comprehensive as I would have liked, and the whole wishy-washy many words = perfect proof grading scheme was a bit sketch. I swear all you have to do to get full credit for the proofs is to structure is with as many bullet points as you can for as many sub-proofs by contradiction, or proof by induction if you're doing anything recursion or DP related - the actual words you write can be gibberish.

Anyways, let's be real here...whether it's Majid or some other CS 180 prof, the best way you are going to learn algorithms is by practicing yourself.

Majid is definitely a great professor. Be prepared to spend a lot of time on assignments. For me, I'd always look at the assignments earlier in the week, see that they're just 6 problems and think that it would be a breeze. But that's never the case. The assignments are going to make you want to claw out your eyes if you really put in the time to try and solve them correctly without just Googling the answer, and that's a really good thing. I felt like I really learned a ton from them. The tests are not so scary if you've done all the homeworks well, although the remote proctoring of the test were pretty scary, especially during the final when for some reason Majid made everyone turn on their Zoom mics during the test. Overall, from what I've heard about the other 180 professors, taking the class with Majid is absolutely the move.