Excellent class and excellent professor.

Prof Meka adapted well to teaching in a covid remote learning environment, his live zoom lectures were generally well prepared and engaging. Exams and homeworks were challenging but fair, and the questions generally posed on them were interesting.

Overall I can say I learned a lot this quarter from him and recommend him and this class.

This is one of my absolute favorite classes I’ve taken at my time here at UCLA. Don’t get me wrong - the material is very, very hard and I’m a very, very below-average student. But Meka teaches in a way that is very well-structured and thorough. Being remote this quarter was a challenge for all my professors, but he provided very clear (if a bit hard to read) notes, reasonable homework and tests, and very well-written and fast answers on campuswire.

This is such a great class. Contrary to the official course title, the main focus of the class is not finite automata. Meka has revised the curriculum to talk about "theory of computation" as a whole, and some of the ideas/ theorems we discussed were honestly mindblowing. The textbook is very modern and completely free online.

There are two midterms and a final. I personally found the exams to get progressively more difficult, although that's probably due to the nature of the material. Overall, they are fair. Make sure to study the class notes, as there are always a few questions that basically require you to recite key ideas. One final note: the exams are timed over Zoom, so I imagine they would be similar to in-person

Great professor, hard exams but extremely generous grading scheme. Would take him again.

Professor Meka in my opinion is the perfect example of a professor who cares deeply about the learning outcome of their students. Professor would write notes live on a platform where you could tune in and watch the live document which was great when reviewing a lecture or perhaps learning missed materials but was also very helpful during class. I am a slow writer and to be able to open the live document and see what I missed even after professor had moved to the next page was very nice.

Again in my opinion professor Meka always had a very approachable way of explaining the concepts and was always more than happy to attempt an explanation from a different angle if it did not make sense the first time. Moreover, professor Meka would occasionally go over brief historical tangents on the course topics, and while I often find it pointless/distracting in other classes, it was actually very interesting and engaging here.

Homeworks and exams were all very fair, never feeling too easy or too challenging, and the homeworks in particular never took too long, around two hours on average at least for me. The textbook was made available online and while never necessary, I found it did a good job at supplementing the materials without being too long or confusing.

I only attended the first discussion section so I can't say too much about the TAs, but the impression I got was that they seemed knowledgeable and that discussion sections were mainly for reviewing supplemental material and for going over concepts helpful to the homeworks.

The course content itself was also very interesting, despite me not thinking it would be going into the course. It very much feels similar to the kinds of topics in CS 180 (which is not surprising), but at least with professor Meka, was paced well and explained clearly.

Super interesting class, Meka is a great lecturer and really good about answering questions. The homeworks are pretty difficult and are mostly graded on completion, but definitely manageable. We had two midterms and one final, all non-cumulative. He's pretty lenient on grading for these-- I basically skipped a question and still got one point for "attempting" it. Overall, would definitely recommend taking this class with Prof. Meka.

Professor Meka in my opinion is the perfect example of a professor who cares deeply about the learning outcome of their students. Professor would write notes live on a platform where you could tune in and watch the live document which was great when reviewing a lecture or perhaps learning missed materials but was also very helpful during class. I am a slow writer and to be able to open the live document and see what I missed even after professor had moved to the next page was very nice.

Again in my opinion professor Meka always had a very approachable way of explaining the concepts and was always more than happy to attempt an explanation from a different angle if it did not make sense the first time. Moreover, professor Meka would occasionally go over brief historical tangents on the course topics, and while I often find it pointless/distracting in other classes, it was actually very interesting and engaging here.

Homeworks and exams were all very fair, never feeling too easy or too challenging, and the homeworks in particular never took too long, around two hours on average at least for me. The textbook was made available online and while never necessary, I found it did a good job at supplementing the materials without being too long or confusing.

I only attended the first discussion section so I can't say too much about the TAs, but the impression I got was that they seemed knowledgeable and that discussion sections were mainly for reviewing supplemental material and for going over concepts helpful to the homeworks.

The course content itself was also very interesting, despite me not thinking it would be going into the course. It very much feels similar to the kinds of topics in CS 180 (which is not surprising), but at least with professor Meka, was paced well and explained clearly.

Prof. Meka, while not necessarily being the most charismatic man in the world, is a very competent lecturer who definitely has a lot of passion for what he teaches. He lectures using an interactive whiteboard, the contents of which are later posted as slides. Those slides are helpful if you attended lecture and somewhat confusing if you didn't. Honestly, go to lecture if you can. Yeah, I know everyone says that, but keeping up with this course dramatically reduces the amount of time you need to study.

For the most part, honestly the material is pretty easy (focus on pumping lemma proofs and reductions from the goated HALTONZERO algorithm), but it's really important and interesting from a theoretical perspective, and it sort of provides an insight into the abstract design of systems with very limited resources. Exams are usually just slightly harder versions of homework questions, and the homework assignments were 1-2 hour long problem sets assigned every week or two; very doable.

Amazing class. Workload was manageable and content was clear. There were 3 exams and they were not cumulative, so it was easy to study for the tests. Would take again