COM SCI 181

Theory of Computing

Description: Lecture, four hours; discussion, two hours; outside study, six hours. Enforced requisite: course 180. Designed for junior/senior Computer Science majors. Finite state machines, context-free languages, and pushdown automata. Closure properties and pumping lemmas. Turing machines, undecidability. Introduction to computability. Letter grading.

Units: 4.0
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Overall Rating 4.0
Easiness 3.3/ 5
Clarity 3.3/ 5
Workload 4.0/ 5
Helpfulness 2.7/ 5
Most Helpful Review
Summer 2024 - Review for 180, Summer 24: tl;dr: take her, her teaching is very useful and is very easy compared to other profs Before taking the class, I didn't have much experience in Leetcode. I can solve medium-level problems, and I definitely didn't know crazy stuff like dp. My professor for math 61 wasn't great either, and I got a B in discrete. However, Prof. Batista is truly the best professor I've had at ucla to date. I've learnt a lot of proof-based math and algorithmic techniques from her, which have helped me in my ECE 102 and CS 35L exams for sure. Batista teaches material very clearly and slowly, is very engaging with students inside lecture and during her office hours (I went to her office hours instead of discussion sections). When I went to her office hours for help with the homework, she gave tips on algorithmic thinking/how to approach the prblem which was much more useful and generalizeable to other problems. The answers to her exams are literally the exact proof she teaches in class, with one twist per question. Exams and homework were very easy to complete. I will acknowledge a few shortfalls from her class: While she did offer 3 1% extra credit assignments (you implement an algorithm she chooses in Python, total of 3% boost to overall grade), some people in class said that she curved down three percent? I calculated my grade and I dont think I was affected by a curve down, so not sure if that's true. Her tests were moderately difficult, but I think this is valid given that she gave 4 hours per exam, open note and no proctoring over summer (I think she made them harder to mitigate Chat-GPT usage/cheating). However, I do think the reviews from summer are a bit biased. Students would ask very basic questions during lectures/information that was covered literally in the prevous slide. Also, this was a summer class, and I think almost all of us took this class as a "cop-out" to taking it over the school year, and I think people are just butthurt that it wasn't as easy as they were hoping it was. I highly suggest taking Professor Batista's class. She's a lot better than the other professors that teach this class (I've seen my friends get cooked).
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