Aria Heidarian

This professor has taught: PHYS121, PHYS122, PHYS161

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Aria Heidarian PHYS121 Expecting an A- Anonymous 03/07/2025	Her lectures are pretty fast paced, but i love that she uploads her notes so quickly. What I've been doing is that i have her for tuesdays and thursdays. on tuesdays when i go to lecture, ill review her notes the next day and google/watch videos to review any concepts i fully cant grasp, i'll also like rewrite my notes with her notes and my notes from lecture. I basically do this twice a week and constantly memorize the formulas whenever I can. Then by the end of the week i compile my notes into a weekly review and it makes her class so light just wanted to share to help any of you. If you ask her questions shes great at answering them too.
Aria Heidarian PHYS260 Anonymous 02/28/2025	Lecture - all over the place, doesn't explain concepts well, skips a lot of steps. Weekly quizzes - fast, harsh, most of the time will bring down your grade instead of raising your grade. Tests - easy questions but way too many and not enough time. She is not testing how well you understand the concepts but how quickly you can read and type numbers into a calculator. Pros - lots of practice material. Cons- practice material does not help for exam.
Aria Heidarian PHYS161 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 01/22/2025	Compared to my high school physics teachers, Dr. Heidarian is in a completely different ballpark. Her lectures are very fast-paced but I found them very helpful, and she posts everything to Canvas quickly after class. Her class is set up well and you go through the material in a way that I found made a lot of sense and allowed me to grasp the concepts as we moved through them. She has plenty of office hours between her and her TA, I hadn't been to any with her but every one I went to with her TA I felt like I understood the material better walking out than I had walked in. She also posts very helpful study guides that model what her tests are going to look like.
Aria Heidarian PHYS161 Expecting an A- Anonymous 01/21/2025	She is honestly a really good teacher. I was scared coming to class because I had really basic physics knowledge, but she took the time to explain things thoroughly. She is literally just trying to help you succeed. All of the lectures, lecture notes, and supplemental worksheets are on canvas and she takes time to answer questions after class if you need. Great teacher.
Aria Heidarian PHYS161 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 01/16/2025	I don't like her lecture style, as she lacks organization and her slides are from OpenStax. However, her tests are pretty similar to the study material given beforehand. What screwed me over was the weekly in-class quizzes, so don't take them lightly. She offers extra credit on midterms, but not finals. If you have already taken AP Mechanics or something similar before, you will land an A pretty easily.
Aria Heidarian PHYS161 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/21/2024	She was very receptive to questions throughout her lectures. Overall she provided good study material for the exams and posted all the lecture notes on canvas. Her canvas page was also very well set up. I would say though the homework is a bit long sometimes.
Aria Heidarian PHYS161 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/12/2024	Heidarian is very nice and her lectures are enjoyable. She does a pretty good job at keeping you engaged. In my opinion, her exams are more than fair (they were honestly easier than the homeworks and practice problems) and if you study you will do fine. Every exam had an 8 point extra credit question so it's not hard to get 100%+ on them. She also provides practice problem sets with answer keys for every midterm which prepared me VERY well. My only complaint is that you don't get really any time to think through example problems in class before she solves them, so I usually ended up just watching her do the problems and not really getting practice myself, but the abundance of resources/practice problems she provides outside of class makes up for it.
Aria Heidarian PHYS121 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/11/2024	Dr. Heidarian is a very lenient person and has pushed back assignments when needed and gives plenty of practice problems to work off of, especially for each midterm. I will say that I honestly struggled with the content but as long as you understand the practice problems she provides to you prior to each midterm your bound to do well because those are almost identical to what you see on the exams.
Aria Heidarian PHYS161 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/10/2024	Very nice person and a very good teacher overall, the one thing that kind of got on my nerves was that she would give you any time to think when she asks you a question. She would help you out even after class, just so you can understand the concept as much as possible. She is all over the place for her notes, but if you don't miss a class, you will understand what is going on. She does go over the notes from the previous class if you miss a class or two.
Aria Heidarian PHYS121 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/09/2024	Dr. Heidarian has set this course up for your success. Additionally, she has decent office hours, and is willing to help you if you need it. The lectures don't really follow the slides on Canvas, but then again, I never paid any attention during lecture, so I couldn't really say. You lose out on working through examples by only reading the posted slides, but it will get the content covered so you can do well on the exams. The grading structure is a little harsh, with needing a 95% to get an A, but then again, with how generously the course is graded, that should be quite achievable. The homework is on ExpertTA, which sucks ass but does mean you can get incredible partial credit on it, so that boosts your grade a lot if you overcome the urge to smash your laptop when it tells you for the fourth time that the answer is wrong with no specific feedback (still an 88% on that question if you get it right the fifth time). Anyways. The lab for this class is brutally stupid, and especially doing the reports was sometimes a shot in the dark because of a lack of real instructions and feedback (I didn't get grades + feedback on many of my labs until six weeks after doing them, in which time six other reports were due, so no chance to improve), but they aren't actually hard from a math or conceptual standpoint. We got a 10% curve on our second midterm when the averages were low, so that was nice. Overall this class is easy, so I think the expectations the Professor has are reasonable and quite generous.
Aria Heidarian PHYS122 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/06/2024	Dr. Heidarian is one of the best and most compassionate professors I have ever had at UMD. She truly does want you to succeed and will to whatever she can to ensure you are doing well in her class. The only thing keeping me from giving 5 starts is the lecture style. Dr. Heidarian's lectures can be extremely dry and disorganized. We would sometimes spend 35 minutes in class deriving an equation that we would only use once or twice on an exam question. The notes were often all over the place, and the material was talked about very quickly, so it was difficult to immediately grasp the content. However, the notes were posted onto ELMS, which was extremely helpful for studying. Aside from that, the class is set up for your success. Homework is 20% of the grade and immensely boosts it. One of three midterms are dropped, and labs are easy points so long as you cover all of the concepts. Overall, if you can sit through a dry lecture with an amazing professor and learn some of the information on your own, you can easily get an A in this class.
Aria Heidarian PHYS161 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/17/2024	An absolutely wonderful human being. I failed PHYS161 last semester and I approached her on the first day of class and her response was something to the effect of "forget last semester, don't let that bring you down, this is a new start." Her teaching style was a little bit unorganized for me. She would post power point slides before lectures for students to download but a lot of her teaching was not actually with the slides, unless it was go over examples. She would use her iPad to write and explain the topics and then skip 5 slides. So it was a little bit difficult to follow and she sometimes just wrote too fast for me to keep up but she always posted her notes from the chapter. Despite this you can tell that she is incredibly knowledgable and passionate about her field and is always happy to answer questions. She is a very gracious grader and in my experience will offer extensions on homeworks when you ask and is always willing to discuss exam grades and where you went wrong if you take the time to speak with her. Lowest midterm and lowest discussion quiz get dropped at the end of the semester so you technically don't have to take the third midterm. I did anyway and got the exact same grade as the first midterm but was granted 2 more points after talking with her. My point is: consider taking the third midterm. You will have 4 Expert TA homework assignments every month, with 2 being due on the 15th and 2 being due on the last day of the month. She is always willing to post solutions to homework problems, or get you started, or elaborate on the process as long as you ask her with enough notice. While her 6 pm classes were a bit rough for me sometimes, especially since they ended at 7:15 pm, I enjoyed not having the class on Friday and her lectures never felt rushed.
Aria Heidarian PHYS161 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/17/2024	An absolutely wonderful human being. I failed PHYS161 last semester and I approached her on the first day of class and her response was something to the effect of "forget last semester, don't let that bring you down, this is a new start." Her teaching style was a little bit unorganized for me. She would post power point slides before lectures for students to download but a lot of her teaching was not actually with the slides, unless it was go over examples. She would use her iPad to write and explain the topics and then skip 5 slides. So it was a little bit difficult to follow and she sometimes just wrote too fast for me to keep up but she always posted her notes from the chapter. Despite this you can tell that she is incredibly knowledgable and passionate about her field and is always happy to answer questions. She is a very gracious grader and in my experience will offer extensions on homeworks when you ask and is always willing to discuss exam grades and where you went wrong if you take the time to speak with her. Lowest midterm and lowest discussion quiz get dropped at the end of the semester so you technically don't have to take the third midterm. I did anyway and got the exact same grade as the first midterm but was granted 2 more points after talking with her. My point is: consider taking the third midterm. You will have 4 Expert TA homework assignments every month, with 2 being due on the 15th and 2 being due on the last day of the month. She is always willing to post solutions to homework problems, or get you started, or elaborate on the process as long as you ask her with enough notice. While her 6 pm classes were a bit rough for me sometimes, especially since they ended at 7:15 pm, I enjoyed not having the class on Friday and her lectures never felt rushed.
Aria Heidarian PHYS161 Expecting a C Anonymous 05/09/2024	Dr.Heidarian is a nice teacher and care so much for her students. She provides a lot of extra problems and solutions for those problems on Piazza. Her exams are fair, but not easy even if you do her practice problems. My only issue with this professor is that she can be dry in her lectures. She goes by too fast, but at least her notes are posted on canvas. Her teaching style isn’t meant for me and I end up struggling a bit in her class. I don’t like how there’s quizzes every week, but it's doable I’ll say. I would recommend her if you got a good background on physics. Her teaching style really emphasizes on your understanding on the concepts of physics. If you can’t understand it then this class gonna be a struggle. I say take Buerle if you just aiming for the grade. His class is similar but curves very well while Dr.Heidarian isn’t nonchalant when it come to curving the class.
Aria Heidarian Expecting an A- Anonymous 04/28/2024	Dr. Heidarian is very kind and very passionate about teaching. Her teaching style may not be for everyone. There is a heavy emphasis on going over practice problems during lecture. I struggled with this as we sped through the conceptual knowledge too fast. Her course is designed to be forgiving in terms of lots of available points outside of exams; however, the trade-off is that 95% is the cut off for an A which is way too high.
Aria Heidarian PHYS161 Expecting a C Anonymous 04/24/2024	Professor Heidarian is a very nice and compassionate professor. She helps you a lot on your homework by posting solutions on piazza and even during her office hours. This class is hard enough at it is and I recommend taking lenient classes so you don’t get overwhelmed with this class. For her exams, do her practice sets that she provides you with. It’ll help you with the exam greatly. Only downside with professor Heidarian is that she can sometimes be quiet and hard to hear. She only curves exam if the class average is below 75(don’t count on it). If you’re looking to just pass the class then go for Buerle(his insane curves) but if you want to learn then take Heidarian.