Selling the book for this class. I will give you a very fair price. Contact **********

I honestly hate this professor.
She should know that we are not majoring in physics and have other things to do besides physics.
avoid taking her..
take my advice seriously.

I've never submitted an evaluation before but taking 6B with Shaked has prompted me to do so.

I wouldn't wish her on my worst enemies. She is one of the worst professors I've ever taken here. Her class is so much work and yet I've learnt nothing, and this is the general consensus among her students. Her exam was long and the questions were stupid. She has a fascination with estimating (estimate the width of a baby's finger, the length of vocal cords etc.). She has pre-flight quizzes which test your understanding on material SHE HASN'T TAUGHT YET. So basically you have to learn the concepts yourself, struggle through mastering physics questions on the topic, then she quizzes you in lecture to see if you've done the questions before attending lecture.

Don't believe the other evaluations. Maybe she was good for 6A but she is HORRIBLE for 6B.

I never write reviews here but I need to say something that contradicts all these bad evaluations. I had Shaked for two classes and yes, she's unorthodox, and yes, her teaching methods can be very frustrating for a linear thinker like me, (they totally were at the time!!) but you don't know how lucky you are until you have another professor. After having a much more traditional professor for 6C I realized how grateful I should have been to have Shaked who really tries to think about how students learn and how to best teach them. Not only does she try to tailor her class to teach life sciences students instead of throwing hard physics at students who think differently, she is perpetually available to help you for hours on end. If you're willing to put in the time to go understand how she wants you to think instead of throwing up your hands, you can do very well and in the long-term. You will also build better foundations to actually understand physics and its relevant applications, and most importantly how to approach solving problems than just memorizing formulas and derivations that you don't understand, like my 6C prof wanted. Anyway, I encourage everyone to take Shaked. You are definitely going into an unusual class, but you should give it a chance and be open to what she's trying and how it could actually be better. You might also come out at the end really frustrated, and I also experienced this, but I'm writing this a few months after being in her class, because she is one of those teachers of which you need some perspective to appreciate the merits.

She's a great person and wants you to succeed, but in my opinion, not a very great lecturer. Classes were kind of pointless to go to but were mandatory because of in-class clickers. Her downfall is that she assumes everyone has a solid foundation of physics and therefore skips any basics, however if you take the time to look at her lecture slides on your own time, they're actually pretty helpful. Unfortunately though, the TA's for this class were absolutely horrible and had no idea what was happening.

Starting this year (Fall 2015), I think, we did "Life-Science Applications" which were just contrived, long-winded questions with crazy units. The first midterm average was around a 56% which was crazy.

Essentially, you'll have no idea what you're doing half the time or where your grade is actually at because her grading scheme is so weird, but she wants you to succeed so it'll work out. Somehow I ended up with an A so who knows how that happened.

I took both 6A and 6B with Dr. Shaked,and I have to say that the bad evaluations are not fair.
Personally, I think everything would be very easy if you ever took AP Physics, and it is kind of Dr. Shaked to have everything other than the exams optional. Just go take the two midterms and the final and you will be fine, or do the participation part if you want to make it safer (it is easy to get a 99%+ for this part, since it is easy, and many bad grades are automatically dropped).
If you did not take AP Physics or did not learn much in high school, well, probably you need to work a little bit harder. Dr. Shaked generally addresses the concepts quite clearly, but you really need to work after class.
I notice that many bad comments are about 6B. I agree that Dr. Shaked's 6B is not that good as 6A, but I think this is basically true for almost every Physics teacher. If you have any friend taking Physics 1B, you would know how great Dr. Shaked tries to be (and essentially is).

Grades:
6A: A+
6B: A+

It honestly doesn't matter if you take her or don't take her. I was in the other lecture with the other professor and this lady decided to do a collaboration. About 80% of the problems came from her and they were grossly excessive, absurdly hard, and stupidly pointless. As nice as I've heard this lady to be, it is just crazy how incompetent she is at teaching. She has the simple minded idea that more problems and more work equates to more learning, but all she ended up doing was exhausting the entire class and pissing off a bunch of people. The typical average of physics exams are usually in the low to mid 70's. When Shaked inserted her problems into Niemann's exam, the plummeted to a 62. The average probably would have been even lower, but the graders quickly realized how stupid the exam was and decided to give full points just for getting close to the answer and the average was still low. NEVER TAKE PHYSICS WHEN SHAKED IS ONE OF THE PROFESSORS. NOT EVEN IF THE OTHER PROFESSOR IS GOOD. There's a good chance that she will screw you over even if you don't take her. Although, you might get a decent grade if you take Shaked's course since she offers a lot of participation grade, this is also a negative in my opinion because a large participation grade suggests that there will be a lot of busy work. My friends said it was hell. Just wait until a quarter comes up where she is not teaching or teaching one of the 6 series that you won't be in. Or wait for summer school. Or maybe if you now the other professor won't collaborate because you know he/she sticks to their own style. I'm not even enrolled in Shaked's course and I am ranting on about her. I'm just really annoyed by this professor. Worst thing that happened to UCLA physics education was when Shaked arrived!

Oh boy where do I begin with Dr. Shanna Shaked...

She is without a doubt the worst professor I have ever had at UCLA. She thinks she is revolutionary with her 'interactive' style of teaching...where she asks iClicker questions that nobody knows the answer to. Then, she wastes a significant portion of class time explaining the answers to clicker questions when she still hasn't even gone over the material.

Oh, and you've probably heard of her lovely fascination with estimating. In one problem, we were supposed to estimate the width of a child's finger. In another, we supposed to somehow know the length/width of a guitar. Or how about the Are you f***ing kidding me? On top of it all....you can't use calculators on exams. So in addition to estimating all of these variables, you're expected to estimate answers that have calculations of (1.6e-19)(*5e-7)/2.6e-4....according to her because the MCAT doesn't have calculators then that makes this reasonable. Oh wait...the MCAT doesn't ask us to estimate the width of a baby's damn finger or ask us to do these types of calculations. Stupid.

In my opinion, what makes her class utterly ridiculous is that I honestly felt like I learned very very little even for someone who works very hard. All of her questions were excessively stupid and did very little to capture our knowledge of physics at all. Homework problems are useless for studying. I genuinely do not know if people who received A's deserved them any more than the people who received lower grades.

Don't let her nice personality deceive you....you have been warned.

Everyone here is just sallty af. Honestly, I really liked Dr. Shaked because she really is concerned about her students. One thing she was a bit excessive on was homework, but honestly, it wasn't even that bad. You're never going get another professor who gives a bunch of EXTRA CREDIT and even GROUP MIDTERMS. Shaked goes above and beyond what's expected of her and works really hard in having her students understand the concepts. If you have any problems with her class, you could always talk to her about your concerns and she's always willing to lend a helping hand. I felt really bad for her though because a lot of people took advantage of her generosity. I mean come on, she gave about like 5-6% worth of extra credit. Not to mention the average for the overal grade in the class was a B+. Yeah, yall heard me it a B+. Don't look at the distribution on bruinwalk. To all the premeds who are complaining, physics is supposed to be a difficult class. Everyone here expects to get an "easy A" without any effort, but yall need to realize you need to WORK for it, especially since it's a 5 unit class.

tldr; she's fine, take her. There are other worse professors out there.

I don't know how she teaches 6B, but for 6A, she was a great professor, genuinely concerned about her students. That being said, she will make you work for the A. It's not impossible, but if you end up with an A in her class, it means you really put in the effort and you deserve it. If you are struggling, you can schedule an appointment with her and she will offer individualized suggestions on improving your understanding and study methods/approaches.

She did bombard us with homework and quizzes. There's "pre-quiz" before the material is actually taught, as well as a quiz on previous material and homework due on Fridays. Unless you have a really solid background in physics, the homework can become pretty challenging, not only because of the difficulty but the many problems she assigns. Yes, her midterms/tests are crazy hard, but she tries to model them after the homework problems you do. The first midterm was especially hard because she did not go over any of the "real life science" physics problems with the weird units. After everyone failed the first midterm, she adjusted her test and offered extra credit. There were many times where she offered extra credit (she doesn't curve though). She also welcomed student feedback after every lecture (another extra credit opportunity) and actually listened and adjusted her classes accordingly.

I had no previous background before taking this class. I struggled the most during the first few weeks. It does get better afterwards.

If you're looking for an easy A, she won't be the best professor for that. But if you don't mind the work, she's incredibly nice, a great person, and good at presenting the material.