Professor Naoz was a great teacher. She is sweet and emphasizes that you don't need to be a genius or have some sort of "physics intuition" to solve physics problems.

There were participation quizzes, homework, two midterms, and a final.

The participation quizzes were just graded for completition and to make sure you're actually showing up to class.

The homework was very fair based on what was learned in lecture, and the deadlines are usually about a week.

I thought that the midterms were easy, they touched on the main concepts of the homework such as the lagrangian and central potential.

The final was fair, however it was very long. Just study the homework and the practice final exams and you should be fine.

The exams were all take home this quarter, and you had about 4 days to complete them. If they were in person I think that they would have been a little too much work to complete in an hour, but for take home they were great.

There is an optional Mathematica component to this class, which offers 15% extra credit. I would recommend anyone to take this class, as the labs were fair and didn't take up too much time. Also, I think Mathematica is a valuable skill, and Corbin was a great professor, so I think it's worth it if it fits with your schedule.

The only problem that I had with Naoz was that she would walk around and ask everybody who they were working with for the in-class problems. I would have preferred if she would just let us work and we would go over it as a class at the end. This is pretty much just nitpicking though.

Overall Naoz was a great professor and I'm taking her again for 105B!

Take her, she's a queen <3 I thought she was intimidating at the beginning because she looks serious just like all the other stem professors but as I got to know her through office hours, I learnt that she is probably one of the most caring people. If you are having any difficulties just go talk to her and she's gonna try to help you a lot. I had an F on my first midterm but I went to talk about her about my difficulties, studied hard got friends in class to help me and got a perfect score on the second midterm and overall ended up with an A. Her HW is pretty heavy I think personally, but her tests are easier.

This woman is absolutely amazing. Her lectures are clear and she actually explains what she's doing (unlike most professors) and even though the class isn't curved her exams are very fair and usually more straightforward than the homework. If you understand the homework the exams are pretty doable. She was also very understanding with the corona virus situation and handled the final and determination of final grades very well. She's also just a really fun and cool person in general. 10/10 would take a class with her again.

Great professor, really cares about students. Very interesting class, is a little hard to read her handwriting but tests are really easy and most people get very good grades. shes great.

Professor Naoz is the best professor I have had at UCLA. She is not only a great person who genuinely cares about her students learning but she also has very planned out lectures that are very clear and understandable with time for practice questions that keep everyone engaged and she really encouraged making friends in the class. The homework was very manageable and related to lectures and the tests were very similar to in class problems and practices she posted on line before. Overall, I definitely recommend taking a class with profesor naoz.

One of the best professors I've had here at UCLA. Professor Naoz is incredibly kind and has many interesting insights about mechanics that made this class super interesting to me. Her homework can be tough but she is more than happy to help in office hours, and if you understand it you should be more than ready to go for the exams, which are incredibly fair. I'd recommend taking a class with her 1000 times over.

I love Smadar. Her midterms are completely reasonable, she overprepares you for them with the homeworks so you shouldn't need to study much. Homeworks can be difficult but go to her office hours. She'll make you try to work it out yourself but she's very helpful. I could always follow with her lectures and she also offers an extra 10% extra credit if you take the mathematica lab. Overall, was a great experience, highly recommend taking her for both 105A and 105B.

I was really intimidated by this class (first upper division physics class moment), but having Smadar as my professor made the entire experience much better. She emphasizes a really good mindset towards physics - that struggling doesn't mean you're failing, that nobody is born with an inherent ability to do physics, that "intuition" is learned and something anybody can do.

You can tell that she truly cares about her students and their success. I couldn't make her office hour time, but sent an email with questions about lecture one day, and she took the time to not only answer my email, but discuss the questions during the next lecture.

The homework felt fair - I always could tell exactly how it was connected to the material we learned in class - but it also took a large amount of time each week. I really, really recommend working on the problem sets with other people from your class. Bouncing ideas off of others and working together was the only way I made it through some of those later week homework sets.

The midterms & final were also very fair, with no trick questions. The optional mathematica lab does require some extra time commitment, but the 15% extra credit was heavenly.

Overall, highly recommend this class with Prof Naoz!

Naoz is a very caring and fair professor. But, she is not a very good lecturer. She likes to do a lot of proofs on the board but skips a lot of steps or context in between, leaving me too bogged down by math to learn the actual physics behind it. You will have to self study and go to your TA's office hours to understand what is happening in this class.

However, she is very fair with her tests and she makes it clear what she expects. She does not test on concepts just recently taught and provides practice problems so you know what type of questions to expect. I would take another class with her solely because she is very careful with the level of difficulty of her tests to make them doable, and easier, than the problem sets.

Also, don't procrastinate the mathematica labs. Actually try to do them weekly. You don't NEED to go to the lab sessions as long as you study the virtual labs well. They are free points that many people won't even end up doing cause they wait till the end.

Naoz wrote her own problem sets and they were perfect difficulty level and memorable. I wanted to like the proofs in lectures, but whenever I tried to replicate them after class, I wasn't able to. But her lectures were pretty engaging and she's a great storyteller.

One time she also made this astro computer simulation about a concept after people asked her questions in office hours, and it struck me how cool and caring she was. Awesome professor and very supportive of diversity. also like the straight grading scale so students aren't competing with each other.