Majid is the GOAT. This has by far been my favorite class at UCLA, regardless of what grade I get at the end. Almost every lecture was engaging, and Majid keeps it entertaining with jokes. He only lectures for 1:30 instead of the full 2, so ending early is always nice. The homework usually took me about 5-6 hours to complete, and require a good understanding of the material so its def not easy. His midterm was easy (you should be fine by just practicing his sample and other previous midterms) but the final was a lot harder (as the reviews before me have made clear). Dynamic programming is definitely the hardest topic in this class, and I'd recommend a lot of practice with a variety of problems.
One criticism I have is that he covers a lot in class that may not be in the textbook (esp proofs). Make sure you attend all classes, and if you can't, get your hands on a good set of notes. Overall would 100% recommend.

He's such a CS legend. End of proof.

"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.

Off the bat; if you can, take this class with Prof Sarrafzadeh in person. And it's a fair bet to say that he's the best so far at UCLA for CS 180.
I took it with him online and well, there are too many challenges that he faces with regards to the online structure. You can't ask clarifying questions during the online exams, you can't ask him questions easily during lectures (and he keeps the chat off), and you can't "hang around" in office hours to learn from other people's questions cause if no questions are left he'll just shut down the zoom link (this is from my experience, at least).

In the bright event that no one has to ever consider taking CS 180 online after 2020, here's my review of the class:

Content:
Hella useful. The course content is really really practical, specially if you want to land in the industry. The algorithmic paradigms he'll use are here to stay for a while and the way you'll have to force yourself to ask clarifying questions in the course will be an immense boost during an interview. Plus dynamic programming is your not-so-brute-but-totally-brute-force way out of a lot of hard problems that an interviewer can throw at you. Basically, CS 32 data structures and CS 180 algorithms are your best friends for an interview. From personal experience, I landed a big-n internship thanks to the greedy and DP paradigms.
Will Prof Sarrafzadeh teach it to that level? No. He'll give you the paradigm, and if you do the hw questions and tackle them for hours on end, you will get a certain amount of intuition. It's really the only way; practice and practice.

Exams:
They will be fair. If you have a strong understanding of the algorithm proofs done in class and have practiced dynamic programming well enough, you'll be fine. Revise the homework, the proofs, and the questions he's done in class. And actually rewrite the class notes religiously, it helps SO MUCH for retention and will save you precious week 10 time when you start preparing.

Curve:
None. :-|. I've even heard he's down curved this time and have 88 and 89% raw scores a B. This should be online specific though; normally he'd give a decent curve I'd assume.

Book:
Read it. If you don't understand something from lecture, you'll find it here. If you understand everything from lecture, you'll find a great revision here.

All that said, this is a very important class and a very interesting one. But also very time consuming. 6 questions only in the homework, but each one took me 4-5 hours. It'll be worth it at the end though.

Shoutout to Lionel for being all round amazing, enthusiastic, and awesome, and for doing all he could to make it as less stressful as possible. Oh and, shoutout to Sai and Evan too for having such awesome office hours! (I didn't interact much with the others haha).

CS 180 is definitely one of the harder CS classes out there, but Majid teaches it well. He does have a bit of a sarcastic lecturing style, but I liked that we did not write any code for assignments and just had to worry about the general approach we would take for a problem. Albeit, exams are very challenging with 'creative problems' (think Leetcode Mediums) that require a lot of critical thinking. However, Majid likes to throw in examples that he briefly mentioned during lecture on exams, so I was able to get a lot of points even if I didn't do as well on the creative problems. Also, show up to Lionel's discussions if he's still the head TA. He's the goat.

I never attended class and used the textbook for everything and got an A. However, I also got some notes from friends and on each test there were a couple questions from the lectures verbatim. So either attend lecture or have a friend give you the notes and you should do well. Tests were also super easy.

I felt the class was pretty fair. The lectures were dry but adequate. Expect to spend a lot of time on the homeworks. They were quite challenging.
The attendance policy was annoying. You had to attend every Zoom lecture and he would cold call people to make sure you were paying attention. This was annoying because it meant you couldn’t watch lectures with friends and it made it harder to attend lectures in a library.

Lectures were very clear and easy to follow, homework assignments were fun, exams were fair, and the professor was accommodating. I have a few small gripes with the course. First, grading was sometimes inaccurate, and I had to submit several regrade requests to fix errors. It felt like graders spent very little time looking at my solutions, which I don't know how to improve given the size of the class. I also thought the mandatory attendance policy was not helpful, and it made me feel like the professor did not trust me to learn the material without being forced to. Despite these gripes, it was a good course overall.

I think this course is very interesting and for the most part it is well designed. I really wish that Professor Majid would have some slides/structure to some of his lectures. I understand that he is trying to introduce a problem and nudge our thinking towards how we should think of a solution. However, for some problems it is not that intuitive and that approach does not necessarily work. In terms of homework, they should really be due on the friday of the following week. That would elevate this class greatly as it gives me time to catch up on the previous week and understand the material but also pay attention to what is going on that week. Overall, I did really enjoy this class and Professor Majid was very reasonable and understanding. He really does want you to learn and understand which I appreicate.

Great content of the class, very useful and helpful algos and methods of thinking. Basically most of what you need for software engineering internship (interviews).
As for the prof and the class structure, the prof is not bad. He's ok, explains stuff well but sometimes is unclear. He doesn't post notes which was kind of lame. The homeworks were weirdly tough imo, the exams/midterms aren't as tough.
Cool class content overall, prof and structure is average-good.