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.

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!

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.

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.