Interesting class, wrong professor to take it with. Most kids are IB kids so they know what they're talking about. This means averages are way higher for hard tests and it does not help that expectations on the tests arent discussed. Avoid taking it with her. She seems nice but is not the best professor

Professor Elham S as a person is great and deserves all the appreciation but as a Professor, not. I had taken Economics Classes in High School but the credit didn't transfer and therefore for me, whether she completed one chapter of all the six chapters, didn't matter. She couldn't go through 6 Chapters or 300 Slides in 10 Weeks! All the students who will take Econ 11 after taking her Class will be unprepared and screwed. This Class has permanently hit my views on UCLA as a University and the incompetent Econ Department.
Midterm 1 was extremely simple. (20 MCQs in 75 Minutes). However, thank God they screwed the printing of Midterm 2 or nobody in this Class would have scored even an A-. I don't know what happened to her and she changed track and made this incomprehensible, complex and difficult Midterm 2 that would make even a Ph.D. Student doubt his or her knowledge. The Final was of medium level difficulty and doable.
The Mindtap Homework ($100 for no value) was graded for completion and there was a Blog that you had to write for which she sent hundreds of emails which no one even read. For an Econ 1 Class a Writing Assignment was a stretch maybe but I found it a refreshing and interesting exercise. Discussion Sections were compulsory and my TA Alex Coblins was great.

Do not take this Class with her if you can, but if you have to, it's fine.

Let's start by saying she never responds to emails. There are no TAs for this class so this is the only way to get answers to certain things.

Also, she never told us if we could or how to review our midterms. The tests have 2 parts: multiple choice and analytic questions. She does not give guidelines on expectations for the analytic questions at all but expects really detailed answers that are vomited from the textbook.

In addition, there is a group project that is 30% of your grade. A book report. This book is SO difficult to understand. She holds office hours for this but frankly should explain it the book in class as well. Her grading scheme on grammar and punctuation is ridiculous for this book report. We're talking -10 for more than 5 grammatical errors.
She does not make the expectations and requirements clear at all yet expects so much. This class is difficult and she is not the professor to take it with.

Overall, in lecture she was just reading off the slides and repeating the important concepts multiple times in a row (which I thought was absolutely unnecessary). Even though she can teach the basic material, sometimes she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. For example, there was one lecture where she was staring at the screen for one whole damn minute, silently, for god knows what reason. She was probably staring at the question, wondering how in the world she came up with the answer. The first midterm she gave us was actually not bad at all, I think ⅔ of the class got an A so we can’t really complain about it. However, things took a turn when we reached our second midterm. The second midterm was CANCELLED because she couldn’t print all the copies properly in time. I literally do not understand why she didn’t double check the day before because it was very frustrating. She ended up posting the midterm on CCLE and it was HARD AND CONFUSING AF. I literally don’t know how in the world she can come up with such confusingly worded questions that none of us could probably answer. She then administered the second midterm the next week, making it optional for those who wanted to take it. We had a writing project, which was hard to dealt with because she sent like 835485 emails about it and we are all super confused what to write about. But throughout the quarter, we went completely off track of the syllabus. We were supposed to go through more than six chapters but ended up barely getting through five, how are we supposed to be prepared for Econ 101? For our last two lectures, the projector broke so we ended up wasting a lot of time because she had to write out everything. Overall, even though it was easy to get an A, I was very disappointed with how the class went since we did not learn much.

The professor made terribly framed questions in exams. The included diagrams in exams are inaccurate and unclear with occasional errors. The exams are barely related to her lectures, and the grading schemes are weird. Her lectures are illogical and not properly structured. Definitely DO NOT recommend taking her class.

The professor never responded to emails, not even to emails sent by TAs. Tests had multiple typos and questions often did not make sense, to the point where a question was removed from the second midterm. Tests also included concepts that were barely covered, while those that were stressed as being vital were left off entirely. The project, which was about the use of monetary policy during the 2008 financial crisis, had guidelines that changed frequently and were often not properly communicated to the entirety of the class. Lectures were somewhat helpful for absorbing the material but were often confusing and tests were largely based off of the textbook. By the end of the class, we had barely covered half of the material that the professor initially planned to teach.

Grades were made up of:
10% attendance of discussions
20% project
15% midterm #1
15% midterm #2
40% final exam

Although the professor is a nice person, I would not recommend taking a class with her, especially not an introductory course such as this one.

Elham is a really nice person, and I think she gets hated on for no reason. Although she isn't the best lecturer, she's more than happy to help you outside of class. Her tests were confusing and inconsistent, I found out some of the questions are written by the TA's, which probably explains this. The class has very easy content, but her tests make it harder than it needs to be.

The project in this class was a lot of work, but the TA's grade it. I started really early, 4 weeks before the deadline, so I wasn't stressed about it.

Overall, I really like Elham and I would take her class again. She is super nice, but her lectures get boring and the tests are confusing.

If you didnt take econ in high school , I would NOT recommend taking econ 1 with Saeidinezhad. She seemed nice, but she felt like just because people who had already taken Econ were doing well in her class, then she must be doing a good job herself, which is not the case. The whole econ department seems to just be out of touch teachers reading from slides made from the textbook company. It was impossible to cover all the material in 12 weeks, and she was a bit of a mess, which just did not help at all. The way these introductory classes are taught at UCLA needs to be changed.

Let's start with I love learning economic concepts. I'm a first year student and this was my first college level economics course. I was super excited going into the course, but was very disappointed. The first thing that really disappointed me was the professor's unwillingness/inability to respond to emails. Nothing sent to her was ever responded to. In addition, the Professor was unwilling to wear a microphone, which wasn't a problem for me since I usually sat in the front row. However, the one time I sat in the second row, I could barely hear her. While she seemed to be a very kind person, she did not always understand the material that she was supposed to be teaching. Basic concepts such as how to calculate slope (change in Y over change in X) confused her. Furthermore, the class progressed at a much slower than usual pace. We barely went through half of the material on the original syllabus, causing much panic and worry from everyone in the class about whether or not we will be prepared for Econ 102. Moreover, she had prepared slides, but often had trouble with the computer in the room and ended up not using them a majority of the time. Although I did not go in to office hours to talk to her personally, I heard that she was very helpful on the one monetary policy assignment (worth 20% of the grade and graded primarily on grammar). Overall, the class was relatively slow paced, repetitive, and the concepts were pretty easy. However, be prepared that a majority of your learning is going to come from your TA (find the best one to make sure you really understand the concepts) since the professor tends to confuse topics and the textbook was pretty vague.

Main problem with this class was a lot of technical issues, some days the projector wasn’t working or the microphone wasn’t working, they even printed the second midterm wrong and just gave us the score from the first one. Overall the class was pretty easy. She gets hated on a lot but it seems like she’s trying her hardest to offer extra office hours or extra emails to help students with either the blog post or lecture.