While the professor was very active on Piazza, which was nice, I don't really feel like this is a class worth taking if you want to actually learn something, as we covered less material than other CS 180 classes have. The professor pretty much just regurgitates chunks of the textbook but in a confusing way. The quizzes were quite annoying; each timed quiz was worth 1% of your grade and there were 10 total, so forget a quiz or mess up on one and you'll be saying goodbye to those points (I said goodbye to quite a lot of those quiz points). I found that the exam structure was also a bit unforgiving; I was really sick during the time of the second exam and ended up doing extremely badly on it, which ultimately ended with me earning my first C.

The biggest problem with this class, though, was the cheating. The high homework and quiz scores were not due to the fact that the students were especially smart, but due to the fact that the students were especially inclined towards cheating. I saw and heard people pass around homework answers; I was even offered some at some point when I asked for help. To prevent cheating, at least a little bit, the professor should use different homework problems each time he teaches the class or something so that people can't just look up the solutions on Chegg.

Overall, I wish I had taken this class with a different professor, because I don't think I learned much at all, and all that this class left me with was a bitter taste in my mouth. To put things in perspective, I would rather take EE M16 with Mehta again than this class.

Homeworks were hard and it can be a lot of work with weekly quizzes. Midterms were easy which meant that it was difficult to get a good grade due to the ridiculous curves. Meka however was a good teacher and really cared about students learning. I did really like this class even if I didn't do well.

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.

Wow, what a cool guy. Not sure if it was just cool topics or he was a great lecturer, but lectures were genuinely really fun. Some people complained he was a bit slow, but honestly I think their attention span is just fried. Lots of partial credit on exams, homeworks are hard but reasonable, and lectures were fully recorded.

He was a bit sad people weren't showing up midway through the quarter and said he would stop posting, but I think enough people showed up and he never took them down. Raghu Meka is my goat and deserves his ridiculously high Bruinwalk score 100%

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.

Got a 89.5 and ended with a B+. Overall somewhat interesting class, not boring.

Professor Meka is definitely one of the best CS professors I've had, especially considering this is a theory heavy course. The lecture content can feel a bit dense towards the end of the quarter where we have 2 weeks of a special topic voted by the class (ours was quantum computing), but I didn't have much trouble understanding things as long as I studied his lecture notes closely. Exams were very fair imo, averages were always in the 80s and similar to the past exams he would give + the homework. There were 3 non-cumulative exams instead of the standard midterm + final setup, which I really appreciated. He didn't have strict grade cutoffs other than >90 being some form of an A, >80 being a B, etc. This year, ~30% had an A or A+ (he rounded all A- to an A), ~60% had a B.

Lecture attendance is not mandatory and he offered a Zoom option + posted recordings, so I would often just watch the recordings at my own pace. Earlier in the quarter, there seemed to be a bit disconnect between lecture content and homework, but he adjusted his lectures to have more exam/hw style examples after the first exam, which helped immensely.