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!

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.

Despite getting an A in this class, I feel very unprepared for future classes involving this subject matter. Being an electrical engineering major, I really needed to understand the material. However, Naoz mostly did derivations of physics theory which left me, along with the majority of the class, extremely confused. They were completely unnecessary and did little to help teach us. Because of all the time spent on derivations, she fell behind the other classes in terms of material covered. We only covered SHM, electric field, electric force, electric potential, and capacitance. The other classes covered that as well as resistors and thermodynamics to name a few. These are things we need to know. The tests were pretty easy though. They were basically what the problem sets she posted were. Honestly, you could probably do well by just reading the book and doing the homework. Going to lecture will not help.