Professor Taghavi had crazy hard tests. The median on the first midterm was 62 and on the second was a 71. The paper format is a little nonsensical as he puts a 35 point question at the end. Hence even if you get the rest of the paper correct but are stuck on this last problem you are not going to do well. This is exactly what happened with me in the second midterm. Get his old tests if possible and go to T.A office hours and practice as much as you can. The lectures were a constant battle to stay up and understanding his lectures were very difficult as well. However he says that he believes that if you show up to lecture and do the homework then you should be fine.; however this is not always the case. Just practice a bunch of problems and try to stay at the top of the class because his curve is horrible. Avoid him if possible as there are other amazing professors for fluid mechanics and you will get to learn much more with them. Also he is super picky about the submission of home works. Be sure to be not more than 2-3 minutes late or else he will not accept your home work.

I will start off by saying that I genuinely believe this professor does care about his students and he does want us to learn.

Initially, I thought I would enjoy being his student since the subject of fluid mechanics already seemed very interesting to me and he seemed to be a very knowledgeable guy who was very approachable.

But as the weeks passed by, I grew increasingly more frustrated with him for a number of reasons.

First, he was a horrendous communicator. I don't know if it is because he does not fully understand the extent of what he is talking about or a lack of confidence in front of an audience (although I'm almost positive it's the latter), but he consistently mumbled his way through concepts and derivations and usually just left us all more confused coming out of lecture than we were going into it.

Second, his handwriting is god awful despite the fact that he regularly asked the class if it needed to be more legible, to which we always replied, "yes." I will be the first to admit that my eyesight isn't the greatest, but I'm pretty sure I should at least have the right to be able to read something on the board if I'm sitting in the MIDDLE of the lecture hall AND I'm wearing my glasses. Dr. Nezhad, if you are reading this, I will tell you again PLEASE write larger and neater.

Third, he was ALWAYS late to class. Normally I would be okay with this if the professor at least gave us some sort of reasonable excuse cause, hey, we are all human, and I imagine he is a particularly busy guy. But the fact that he never once mentioned to us why he was 10 minutes late to class when the rest of us had to drag our butts out of bed to get to an 8 am lecture on time is extremely disrespectful and a waste of our time. This was worsened by the fact that he did not tolerate tardiness on wednesdays by having the TA's not tolerate homework that was just a few minutes late. I personally never had to worry about turning in my homework late since I am a morning person and I have no problem with 8 am lectures, but for the 90% of my colleagues who are not morning people, this is unacceptable.

Lastly, his curve is pretty horrendous (at least looking at spring 2014). I have no idea if how tricky his curve was this quarter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was also terrible. I felt like I put by far more effort into this class than my others, but I still did better in my other classes than this one.

Please take this class with someone else. I can see it being a lot more interesting and fun, and maybe you will learn better than all of us who were cursed with this professor.