I have taken Abeer Hamza for over a year and this is my full and final review of her as a Professor:

She’s literally racist; for a project once, she said my interview of a Heritage speaker didn’t count because I didn’t interview an ‘actual Arab.’ Mind you, the person I had chose to interview was a Pakistani who was born and lived in the U.A.E all her life and spoke Arabic fluently.

She takes forever to respond to her emails. A professor who cares to respond and communicate with her students makes a world of difference in the classroom, and Hamza just doesn’t do that.

She gives an insane amount of homework as if it’s a high school class. Her inconsistency with her advice and feedback on the homework doesn’t make it any easier. For example, she’ll let you go weeks doing the homework a certain way, until she finally decides she wants you to do it another way. She once gave us the whole day to submit a test and we had two attempts….GREAT! But then for the second test she gave us only an hour to finish and expected us to take it twice as well. In short, she’s lazy and inconsistent with her grading.

She is not lenient with attendance. Your dad could be dying, and she won’t care. She’ll mark you for being absent.

This is the laziest Professor I have come across in my entire academic career. She refuses to have classes in-person even though 95% of the class will ask her. Doesn’t grade fairly or consistently, and can’t even communicate to you regularly via email. She isn’t fit for teaching.

Abeer Hamza has been a huge headache for the year that I’ve taken her. Myself and several other classmates literally have had emotional breakdowns to each other. So if you take Hamza, and you’re not an Arab that speaks fluent fusha, understand that you’re in for a ride.

Professor Abeer is a wonderful Arabic teacher. I had her for Arabic 102 (A,B, and C). She's extremely nice, she rarely gets angry, and she's great at explaining the grammar and breaking it down for students to easily understand. To the reviewer who complained about her explanations, I suggest that perhaps the question was poorly formulated. I've been studying Arabic for years, and I've had a lot of teachers. An interesting phenomena I've noticed is that students will ask a question, and the teacher will start giving an explanation for something else. It's usually because the question wasn't specific enough. You have to know what you're asking. This doesn't just happen in Abeer's class, so it's not a problem specific to her, or even specific to professors, but it directly applies to the students. As soon as the student really understands what it is they want to ask, Abeer's explanation is precise, simple, and clear. So I would say your “3 times out of 5” is that the person asking the question didn't know what they wanted to ask and the question was vaguely formulated. She has a PhD in English/Spanish/Arabic translation, and she's very good at it- in fact, her excellence in the English language also allows her to be more lenient in what she accepts for correct answers on a test. If she didn't understand English, people’s grades wouldn’t be as high. I've had teachers who marked the word "groundwater" wrong on students' tests because they interpreted it as "water under the ground" and that was the only translation they'd accept because they didn't understand the English language. So I think Abeer is superior in that respect- she DOES understand what you're trying to say, even if you word it poorly. So with the questions, I think the problem is that the student is just not being specific enough. If a question is vague, how can she be expected to answer that to the student's satisfaction? Arabic is a language with a lot of very specific rules- questions, then, need to be equally specific.

As far as organization goes, it's clear she plans ahead. I thought the lectures were organized very well. She clearly has a sense of what she wants to teach every day and what she wants to go over about each concept. Students hold up the progress by not preparing for class. Sometimes the new concept builds on the last one, so preparation and reinforcement of a concept is key to understanding the lecture. Sometimes the explanations in the book border on the ridiculous, but her explanations a lot of times are way better than the ones in the book, so again, this is evidence of her ability to break things down understandably.

Her only fault is that she’s too nice. She doesn't put her students on the spot, and is very lenient with homework and test answers. I think basically everyone gets an A in her class- showing up and doing the work almost guarantees an A. A bad grade in her class is not her fault. She has office hours and is very available, and is more than happy to help you if you have a problem. So there's no excuse for a bad grade because it's really, really easy to get a good one if you do all the assignments.

As far as the book, she didn't choose it, the department did, and she shouldn't be blamed for that. Also, there would probably be more time to cover interesting things if the students actually prepared for class, but no one ever does except for a few people, and of course you can only be as good as the weakest link, so the class goes slow and because of the people who didn't make the effort, you're chained to the book the whole two hours instead of getting to speak more or do something interesting and fun. It's amazing the amount of people who think they "know" Arabic because they sat in a class or spent a quarter at AUC, but when asked to translate a normal news article or even a simple text about the Wright Brothers, they can't, and then complain about texts that are long but still ridiculously easy for "intermediate" level Arabic. Or they think that they are awesome at speaking and in reality they are terrible and can barely be understood. (There's a huge difference between mokhtalef and motakhalef.) It's a miracle she knows what they're trying to say. I think she’s incredibly patient, very supportive and encouraging, and she definitely knows how to explain things well. She’s a great teacher and one of the best Arabic professors I’ve ever had.

Sadly, Abeer is basically the only professor teaching the Arabic language classes at UCLA. Her class was so unorganized, unclear and poorly taught classes I have ever taken at UCLA. When explaining grammar, if a question was asked in English 4 times out of 5 she would not understand or answer the question correctly. If you asked more questions, she would begin to take it personally, getting seemingly infuriated with the student asking the question. Also, Al-Kitaab is probably one of the worst books to learn Arabic from, at least at the Intermediate level and above. Overall, UCLA has a strong Arabic program, but teaching adjuncts like Abeer sadly do not reflect that fact.