For the life of me, I will never understand why Professor Amar continues to teach at this institution. He is a fine professor. The class is fine. It covers the back half of the 105A textbook, and covers the classic thermodynamic cycles. It met the job.

Amar is an awful professor. He spent the first 3.5 lectures repeating content from 105A - review that long is excessive and wasted my time. He does not know how to use a computer. He doesn't post his lecture notes, and it's difficult to do practice problems when you have to copy extensive problem statements instead of utilizing slides. His premise is that he adds more value than the textbook, which is rather bold. His lectures have step by step guides on how to solve problems, but he regularly overcomplicates concepts. The examples in the textbook were far more effective. Half this class is reading steam tables, and he manages to severely over complicate even that menial task. All we have to do is find the enthalpy at every point in the cycle, and yet it took weeks to go through that content. He should have never been allowed to return after his two heart attacks. He should not have replaced Fisher for this quarter, and he should not be teaching two classes this quarter (or even one class). He wastes time and is ineffective. Everything I learned in this class came from working through the homework and reviewing the solutions. He cares, he's passionate, and he's kind, but that doesn't overrule his weaknesses.

There was a class where he wanted to distribute some worksheets. Instead of posting them on BruinLearn like any normal professor, he printed them all out. Fine. He handed them to the front of the class and asked us to distribute them ourselves. It took 30+ minutes for every student to get every sheet of paper. And the sheets were not particularly useful in our understanding - they didn't add much to the textbook, and were honestly just a mess.

The class ie needlessly hard. I attended office hours for the professor and TA as well as the final discussion, and none of these sessions actually covered in depth what would beon the final. In fact, the week 10 discussion covered 2 problems that previously had been covered on HW and whose solutions were already available, and 1 problem that the professor explicitly ruled out. Huge chunks of the class like refrigeration, Otto/Diesel/Dual Cycles, Cooling Towers, and more were never assessed, while exergy and the Rankine/Brayton cycle were excessively emphasized and final problems on Combustion and Maxwell’s relations were assigned that were all borderline impossible. The class is a shitshow, there’s no rhyme or reason, and Amar is oblivious to how poorly everything is executed. Thermodynamics is interesting too, making it all the more disappointing to slog through this class. As compensation, the curve is generous and I scraped through with a far better grade than I deserved.

Amar is a nightmare. The MAE department secretary was visibly fed up with him when I attended Office Hours. He forgets thinks constantly, including to write one of his students a letter of recommendation. He doesn’t communicate with his TA, so the course is poorly integrated. He is a bad teacher. UCLA should hire the best and brightest, especially for core classes like thermo - yet we use the same lecturer (NOT a professor) as CSUN, suggesting the department is unwilling or unable to hire a proper thermodynamicist. What a disappointment.

For a man so close to death, he wastes an awful lot of his own time and even more of ours. I wish him all the best, but I beg the administration to encourage him to retire as soon as possible.

Very disorganized, hard tests and homeworks are nothing like the exams. His quizzes are based on lecture content but the final was brutal.

I took Amar for both MAE 105A and 133A. He was a lot easier for 105A. He is very clear in 133A, just like he his for 105A, but his exams are a lot trickier and there isn't enough time to complete them. Midterm and final were hard and tricky. Try to understand the concepts he teaches in class because much of his exams test you on your understanding of the first and second laws of thermodynamics. On the plus side, his homework load is not too much. However, the homework is very basic compared to the exams. As for the design project, make sure to get good group members that don't slack off or anything. Start it early because for our group we started two weeks before the due date and barely finished the night before.