When I first read the comments about Professor Abidi's lectures, I thought this was another case of the class pet defending a horrible lecturer who only they could learn from. You know, those lecturers who try to hide the fact they can't teach by making you feel like they're 100 times smarter than you and you're just too stupid to get it.

But I was wrong. His lectures ARE excellent and I honestly think it would have been a great tragedy had I not taken this course with Professor Abidi. I have gained more understanding of circuits and EE in this one course than I have in all three years at UCLA combined. I don't care how harsh his grading is, it was totally worth it.

I have also found the claims about him being arrogant to be entirely untrue. Maybe people just get that impression from his accent. In reality, this is a man who honestly cares about whether his students learn something or not, and I never once found him unapproachable.

If you want to understand what it is you've been doing for the past few years at UCLA, take him!

Well Well Well ...

Abidi lives! Much to the misery of his students, though, it would STILL seem!

So...I was his student...TWENTY FOUR YEARS AGO...I took 3 courses with him!

And all this time later, I still remember almost everything he taught me. Like it was yesterday.

I guess I remember it because over the years I've used the way he taught us how to think about circuits, how to get to KNOW them, to grow in my own abilities.

I'm still an Engineer. I absolutely love what I do. And I owe it all - no really - ALL, to Dr. Abidi. He turned my head around from looking at electronics mechanistically, like I had been taught in other classes, back to a more intuitive feel for the field, something I knew I had when I was a kid taking apart old radios and tv's, but which I lost among the cramming of lower-division EE.

So take this old veterans view of things. Stick with him, through hell or high water. Go back to the stuff you didn't get and work on it later until you do. Build the circuits yourself to figure some of the stuff out (you can't do it all on paper...), and forget the grades.

I don't think I got more than a C in any of his classes (maybe one B, in the last one). But I'm a far better Engineer than any of my peers. Hands down. Because I LEARNED.

So if you're ever on this page, Dr Abidi, THANK YOU. SO. MUCH.

Professor Abidi is in fact brilliant and can articulate ideas incredibly well. In my opinion, he has got to be one of the best circuit designers on the planet. So why was my Fall 2010 EE 115B experience such a bad one?

- The homework was above and beyond the undergraduate level. I found myself reading graduate level books and research papers to try and understand the course material.
- He did no examples in class.
- Our TA (Sam) simply didn't care.
- One of our homework sets was lost. This is really bad considering there were only 4 assigned throughout the quarter.
- Professor Abidi's ego was intimidating
- I ended up in the lower 70th percentile and still got an F.
- Some of the things he said about international students during lecture were completely inappropriate.

He will insult you in class. He will fail you because you don't meet his standards. He's smart, but too smart to teach undergraduates.

Taking this course with Professor Abidi was one of the worst experiences of my life. If you want to get dropped to the floor and then kicked around go for it. Save yourself some intense headaches and avoid him at all costs.

Definitely one of the most knowledgable Profesor that I know so far. Gives very eye-opening lectures in the EE115B class, but I wouldn't recommend taking him to be honest.

For sure, he has an amazing understanding of circuits and can analyse circuits easily with his intuitive insight. However, this ability isn't that easy to be picked up by undergraduate students. I personally believe those "insights" and "intuition" can only be built upon a prior solid understanding of the material.

I don't know whether he made the exam too hard for us this quarter, or we the students, as a whole, failed to grasp the concepts he attempted to convey.

The lectures, to me, weren't that all hard to follow. The lectures were all very interesting and eye-opening, but in my opinion, has very little value in helping you solve the problems on the final exam. As a result, the average for the final was way below average ee115b classes.

One interesting I heard is that he pretty much took over EE3 last quarter, where usually there would be a guest professor speaker for every lecture. Last time, he showed up in most of the EE3 lectures and pretty much talked about everything in EE by himself.

In the fisrt few weeks, Prof Abidi convered stuff that isn't the core of ee115b (ie convolution, laplace transform..). Those, to me, did not help me at all in terms of the learning of ee115b material. However, how he explained those concepts again to the class in a diffent perspective was quite interesting. I would recommend offering somthing like an EE333 class (perhaps P/NP) where Prof Abidi can teach and will cover the highlights of whole EE curriculum.

The whole class that took EE115B with him this quarter ALL experienced quite a GPA drop. It might be the case that we, the students, didn't learn the material properly, but I don't think we were the one to blame. Most of the students that I know spent extra time and dedication to the course compared to other classes but still ended up getting a poor grade. I personally believe it's Abidi's teaching style that resulted all this. According to Prof Abidi, it's our prior EE professor's fault that they didn't get us prepared good enough to understand his lectures. This maybe partially true, but that certainly is NOT the main reason.

Bottom line: For your own best, avoid taking Abidi so you can get a reasonable grade, apply for good Grad school and move one with your life. It is, however, not such a bad idea to sit in his class and see how the same material can be analyzed differently.

You know there's problem when nearly HALF of a class (~45), COLLECTIVELY goes to the dean to complain about a professor.

The average was a D and nobody got A. 1 person got B+ and that's about it. I think the review below mine says it all. I think the guy that wrote the review 3 times below mine is on crack. He is a good professor but you get so screwed...and Sam was the worst TA ever. He got fired because he did such a terrible job

If there is one professor in the EE department that is destined to screw you over, it's Abidi. At the beginning of the course, he was surprised that most of the students taking the class were seniors, but he was too arrogant to realize the fact that the course was only offered once a year; because of this, he pitched the level of the course higher than usual. How much higher? It was ridiculously impossible to follow his lectures since he always assumes that we know everything that we learned in EE 10, 110, and 115A. His line of reasoning was, "Well the students only took it a few quarters ago. I took it 30 years ago."

I also remember that in another lecture, Abidi got really mad at us for not being able to analyze a circuit that seemed simple to him, but difficult to us. He told us that he was "flabbergasted" and that he threatened to even CANCEL the class! I had never seen a professor so mad at us before I took this class.

Abidi never does example problems in class; that's a huge reason why nobody did well in his class (he didn't even give a single A to anybody). When a student asked him to do an example problem, he replied, "Well then how would you know whether or not to apply this example to a homework problem?" I didn't understand the logic behind that because I usually depend on example problems to do homework problems.

The midterm was ridiculous. A bunch of people scored below 10% because of his harsh grading style; I felt like you could get a vast majority of the problem right, but if for some reason you wrote down R2 instead of R1, it's an automatic zero. The midterm was out of 110 points, and the average was 27. Oh and did I also mention that the TA didn't even allow us to ask any questions during the last 30 minutes of the exam?

The final was ridiculous also. Similar results. The final was out of 180 points, and the average was 29.

As far as homework is concerned, here's the good news: Abidi assigned only four homework assignments throughout the whole quarter. Here's the bad news: Half of them were due on 10th week. Here's the worse news: The very first homework assignment never really counted because the grader supposedly lost all the homework assignments by accident (although it's very possible he just didn't want to grade them). So what did Abidi do? He gave all of us a 70/100 on the first homework assignment. I thought it was ridiculous how he gave the exact same grade to everybody on Homework 1. I felt like the grading got lazy on Homework 2 as well because a vast majority of students scored 17 out of 25 on that assignment. Homeworks 3 and 4 were so long I didn't even get a chance to finish them.

The TA for this class was completely useless (except for the last couple or so weeks when he actually DID example problems). He also has an arrogance, and he shows it through his emails to the class.

Overall, Abidi can teach, but his teaching style is a complete goofball to over 90% of his students. If you want to learn circuits from a quality instructor, take someone else instead. If you want to make your life a complete hell and turn into a circuit zombie, by all means, take Abidi.

Oh and did I also mention that Abidi gave half the class D's and F's?

OK let me first tell you about how this guy curved our class:NO A's ,15 B's,20 c's,15 D's,and 25F's. my ranking was 29th out of 86 and i got a C-!!!i know its hard to believe but its true,simply dont take him.he is in sain!!!.teh level that he expects from you is grad course level altho he doesnt teach you much he expects you to knwo every thing.beacouse of him i changed my path way from IC to signal and systems.if you have to wait for one more year to take this course with someone else' do so and dont even think about taking this course with himmm!!!