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.

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.

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.

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

I initially thought Meka would be a pretty boring lecturer based on the first class but I was happily surprised. The lectures ended up being really interesting and it was easy to tell that he was passionate about what he was teaching. His tests were fair and he provided 3 yrs of practice exams and additional hw problems which were very helpful for the exams (many problems were similar to the practice). There were 3 non-cumulative exams (instead of a midterm and a final) so if you didn't do well on one of them you could still make it up on the next ones. HW was manageable and lectures were recorded. The content was occasionally dense but it's a theory class so that's to be expected. Overall, Meka was a great prof to take this class with.

Meka is a great professor. 181 is definitely a hard class but somehow Meka made this class extremely enjoyable. His OHs are great and he explains everything really well. For the midterms and final, the best way to study is literally just going to his OH and do the practice problems with him. Or just simply be there and listen to what other people are asking. The 1 hr OH is somehow the most productive studying sesh ever.