Naoz really cares about her students, but she is a lousy lecturer. She spends a lot of time going over confusing proofs that are really not helpful or relevant. She made it seem like her class was going to be very difficult, but it wasn't, so don't worry!

Her first midterm was super easy, and the second midterm and final were of medium difficulty. Some problems were right off her example problems, so memorize those! She gives too much extra credit on the tests, and the averages are high.

Weekly masteringphysics. She gives optional problem sets with solutions that have some mistakes, but are very similar to the tests so you should do them.

There is a participation grade for answering polls in class (like online polls, with your phone, not a clicker). You can miss a couple though and not lose points.

I really liked Dr. Naoz. I don't think she was exactly the best professor I had, but I only say this after having tons of other amazing teachers. She is definitely up there, but certain things kinda didn't do it for me. The class itself is super interesting, there is tons of fundamental and interesting concepts brought up throughout the quarter. The first 3 weeks are a review of freshman physics, especially oscillations. She particularly emphasizes these, heavily I should say, but they are extremely important. Then you learn calculus of variations and are introduced to the Lagrangian which you spend most of your time on. You do examples of this and then jump into Central Force problems, which I found kind of dull and information dense, so towards the last 3 weeks got boring for me.

I think a lot of times she is great, she heavily emphasizes derivation which I personally enjoyed. I think when derivations started to dwell a bit too far into pure math topics, she definitely got lazy and cut some corners, so when lectures around that time were a haze and I couldn't follow too well. She is fantastic when it comes to working with the class and I think she is better suited to teaching small classrooms. She would stop class to work on problems and she would walk around the class, but she could not ever get to most students. The thing I really HATED about the class is that she does not believe in curving. This was pretty scary, especially once you get so used to it from other classes. Her problem sets were challenging for me and took tons of time, but she offers extra credit and you need every ounce of it unless you're just a physics genius, which I am not.

On the midterm: KNOW HOW TO SOLVE NON-HOMOGENEOUS 2nd ORDER DIFF EQS. She asked this every year she taught, including ours. On the final, good luck, that shit was not easy, so just be extremely familiar with every problem on the problem sets and spend time with the TA's, they'll drop some pretty hefty hints.

Out of 82 people 20 people managed to get an A which is pretty low compared to the grade distribution shown for 2016 so don't get too deceived by how easy the class seems in the first several weeks and even past the midterm. I think she does an impressive job of designing tests that are pretty fair in difficult that they don't need to get curved. The midterms seemed stupid easy but the final will make or break your grade.

MATHEMATICA: This does not appear on your class planner, but it is 10% of your grade. Corbin hosts 2 hour labs on teaching you this crap which ends up being your life-saver and best friend on later problem sets if you take the time to learn it. A good majority of the class was lazy af and didn't do it completely but it is honestly free points, Corbin is pretty chill about grading if you get the good majority of it.

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.

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.

Prof. Naoz is one of the most kind and caring professor I had at UCLA! She is always super engaging and fun (she is so fashionable too :D). You can tell she really cares about her students (both as human beings and as learners). I love how she is always excited and teaches us cool things to relate the concepts we learn in class to things that are actually relevant in real life! As someone whose primary major is not Physics, she really inspires me to want to pursue Physics more seriously (never once in my life had I considered pursuing Physics PhD after grad, but I guess here we are).

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!

Prof. Naoz is the GOAT. I didn't know what to expect for Physics 105B judging from my humdrum 105A experience with another professor, but she completely changed my perception of an ideal physics class and actually showed what this physics is used for.

Firstly, she is a very engaging lecturer who actively encourages participation, learning, work, and collaboration from us. Not in a forceful or demanding way, but actually a genuine teacher who strategically gets people involved with multitudes of extra credit opportunities, participation quizzes without punishing answers, and rewards people for paying attention and correcting her mistakes by throwing chocolates. She occasionally cracks funny jokes, lots of pop culture references (which are getting stale, much to her chagrin), most importantly, cares about her students' learning. Heck, she cites studies about the best ways of teaching students and accommodates for peoples' conflicting midterms by extending homework deadlines! Furthermore, she oozes with passion for physics, as she gives presentations showing the applications of the physic we are covering and often relates it to astrophysics, which is her main field of study (and also totally my thing). Her class is so lively with these things, it's so much more different that any other (upper) physics class I had. I imagine Naoz has spent an ungodly amount of time and effort into meticulously planning how she would teach this class. She has been teaching this class for multiple years and apparently this quarter is the last time she would do that, so god fricking damn please give her an award and let her keep teaching 105A and 105B!

Naoz's homework and example problems are quite challenging and I personally had to rely on office hours to figure these out. Naoz's office hours for homework help and concept clarifications are helpful; instead of straight up giving the answer, she really makes you learn by making you do the work yourself while nudging you along the way. I do wish she offered more office hours or extended them, because I found her more helpful than the TA. All of these did help prepare me for her exams, which turn out quite straightforward compared to her homework; she has even said that herself, just to eliminate any exam stress.

I have heard only positive things about Dr. Naoz, so I came into the course very excited to have her as my professor. She is a very inspirational person. From her cheering us on for every exam and offering extra credit to citing studies on how education can better benefit students, it is clear she genuinely cares about teaching as well as her students.
However, I genuinely struggled to learn in this class. The exams were often worded in ways that were extremely confusing to me, and some questions had no indication that you needed to solve a problem a certain way or show work in a specific way. The exams themselves were easy conceptually and math-wise, but I just struggled with the wording. I also struggled to follow her lectures because of how disjointed they could be. She frequently made mistakes, would misspell words, and backtrack to the point where there were times I just stopped taking notes.
For better or worse, Dr. Naoz puts a lot of emphasis on astro-related concepts. Also, the content of the class is very skewed. You barely learn anything after week 7. If you come in with a strong foundation of Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, and special relativity, this class should be quite easy for you.
Overall, the class was relatively easy, but the lectures were a bit difficult to follow. It's doable to teach yourself from the textbook.