Professor Meka was one of the BEST professors I have had in the CS department! I think he did a great job teaching this class remotely. The course structure was changed this quarter and was more about "Theoretical Computer Science" than what it was before. The content was always very interesting and often times mind blowing, especially near the end of the quarter when we covered uncomputability, TM, and proved Godel's Incompleteness Theorem!! Coming into this course, I had no idea what TCS is about and even though I am not that interested in the field, I still find the class very interesting.

This class is full of proofs and you won't write a single line of actual code (aside from pseudo-code). Proofs are difficult, but with Professor Meka's great explanations, it becomes somewhat manageable. All the HW are proof-style questions that re-empahsizes concepts taught in class. About half of the questions will be somewhat doable if you attended lecture, but there will always be VERY HARD questions on the HW that I couldn't figure out on my own even if I were to stare at the question the whole day. Even so, the TAs were extremely helpful!! They would often give hints to difficult HW questions during discussion and if you need more help, you could always go to OH where they go over the HW questions in detail until you understand them. S/o to TA Hadley and Shawn!

There were 3 non-cumulative exams throughout the quarter (including the final). The exams were increasing more difficult and I would say that the final was really hard (but still doable imo). Even though, I only did well on the first exam, and scored about average on the latter two exams, I was still able to get an A. I think there is a nice curve.

Compare to my friends who took it in previous quarters with the old course structure, I would say this class is definitely **harder than before**, but you will definitely learn A LOT more than ppl in previous quarters did. So, I 100% recommend taking this class with Meka!! You will have a great time and learn a lot :)

meka is amazing. his lectures are super insightful and genuinely thought provoking. i came in expecting to hate 181 but it ended up being one my favorite ucla cs classes. his exams aren't necessarily easy but i felt that they were fair.

biggest tips for success in the class:
1. do all of the practice exams since your exams will have a similar structure
2. do the practice problems on the hw to the best of your ability. even if you can't do them completely on your own, make sure you understand the solutions. a similar problem usually comes up on the exam!

One time I asked a question after class and the next class he brought up my question to the whole class, saying that it was a good question and sharing the answer with the entire class. I'm still living on that high. Anyways, Prof Meka is great and presented the material of this class very well. His explanations are very clear and he welcomes student questions. Definitely take this class if you are even slightly interested in the more theoretical side of CS!

Prof Meka is a legend. Dude is super passionate about Theoretical Computer Science, and does a fantastic job of channeling that passion every lecture. Theoretical CS is kind of an oddity among the rest of the CS classes, so the material can be difficult to grasp at times. However, Meka goes slowly and methodically, and makes it much easier on the class.

Homeworks were easy for the first half of the quarter and got kinda obscure towards the end, but overall not super time consuming. He uses a 3 midterm approach, with each midterm considerably more difficult than the last. I know everybody wants this class with Sherstov but I have no regrets taking it with Meka.

This is by far the worst professor and class I have had at UCLA. Meka may seem like a nice guy on the surface but he does not by any means prioritize student's best interests in his classes. He believes that his class is the most important thing in your life and that he is upholding a high academic reputation for his class by being a d**k about grades. A classic example is one time the TA lost a students hw assignment, he gave the scores out on a Friday before a final, and when the student complained about the 0 on Saturday and asked for a regrade he told him no because he deemed it too close to the final exam.

HW assignments are graded extremely harshly. You will spend hours doing them and then get destroyed during the grading. If you try to reason with Meka and complain about your grade, he will not help you out.

Bottom line is that if you dislike yourself and would like to make your algorithms experience as terrible as possible, go ahead and take Meka. I actually hated this class more than 111 with Eggert, which is really saying something.

The time-consuming homework assignments left a bad taste in many people's mouths. They primarily involved providing an appropriate algorithms for particular scenarios and proving their correctness, time and space complexity. Many people felt the grading was inconsistent, but that reflects more on the grader than the professor. Solutions to each homework was provided, so after one or two assignments, it was more clear what was expected from us. Although I spent multiple hours on each assignment, in many cases, coming up with the algorithms did not take nearly as much time as articulating the proofs clearly and thoroughly. I ended up with a high grade in the class, but I definitely didn't feel significantly more prepared for tech interviews as advertised.

The lectures were clear. The algorithms and proofs he presented in class all seemed to make sense. The homeworks were extensions of these algorithms and proofs. Sometimes the extension was a little too far, which made the homeworks pretty difficult and time-intensive. You learn what he expects after the first assignment's solutions are posted. I think a lot of people aren't used to the rigorous proofs he expects, which made them unhappy with the course. I would agree that I would've rather written some code for these algorithms instead of worrying about the proofs so much.

The exams were easier than the homeworks (as you would expect, since the homeworks took so long). If you understand what you did on the homeworks or at least why the solutions posted are correct, the exams should be pretty straightforward and you should get a pretty good grade.

Meka has made the course workload and exam difficulty very reasonable since he last taught it in 2015. Textbook is not needed, just focus on lecture slides which are posted online, and homework sets. Sometimes in lectures Professor Meka goes over complex proofs (such as runtime of Quicksort/Quickselect) but he generally does not give exam questions on these.

Meka went through most of the topics on his iPad and Apple Pencil, which basically is an advanced white board. He will post the transcripts immediately after the class. In general the course is very well organized. There are 3 exams (including the final), which are all roughly equally weighted and are not accumulative. Really necessary to point out that a lot of the comments on Bruinwalks are not fair at all. He is a great professor if you want to take 180 with him.

Meka is organized and nice, but he assumed we knew a lot more coming into the class than we actually did. He would present topics without a lot of lead-up, so you'd be suddenly looking at things like advanced probability without having taken any statistics classes (and even the people who had taken those classes said that they'd never seen before the material Meka was presenting).
Classes are all about new material, but there wasn't a very cohesive chain of applicability for all the different topics, so it made it hard to absorb the info; it just seemed like a big bag of difficult, seemingly disjointed material.
Meka's a nice guy, but he tended to not tell you how to do things for fear of "giving away the answer". Consequently, any methods you developed to solve any questions was of your own doing.
If Sean is still TAing, he's a big help.
Overall, I feel like the class was unnecessarily hard and you didn't leave feeling like you had new tools in your coding arsenal; you just left feeling glad that it was all over.

If you are in this class, here are some things that can help:
He sticks fairly close to the book, so if you can read the chapters before lecture, you’ll be ready to hear his advanced versions of the material.
The homeworks were ridiculously hard, but once you have the answers (TA help…), really understand how you got there, because his exam questions are often just versions of those HW questions (and/or versions of some proof he did in class).
He really expected us to reference algorithms/proofs he did in lecture. If you can remember all those, you only need to add “blah blah algorithm/proof, as shown in lecture” much of the time for full points. In fact, NOT referencing one of those can often wipe points off your HW/exam even though you did everything else right.

Overall, the HW grading was up and down (high average for the class on one assignment, then an inexplicably, drastically low average on the next) and we often weren’t sure what constituted a “correct answer” because the instructions were vague, yet the grading was very specific, like a N Campus class looking for you to mention key words to match the grading rubric.

Like I said, perhaps his teaching methods will change and he did grade fairly with the final grades, but I would recommend someone else if you want to really “get” algorithms.