Professor Abdou is decidedly average. His lectures are totally useless, so don't expect to get anything from them. He never does examples in class. Go to discussion to see how to actually apply the material, and do the HW. The midterm was very straightforward, if you did the HW and a few review problems you should have been able to do well. The final however was absolutely brutal. His claims that the last chapter wouldn't be tested were lies. He seems like a pretty nice guy, my grade is frankly a miracle given how bad I did on the final, but the actual instruction in this class is simply not good.

Professor Abdou is a great professor. Professor Abdou cares about his students and did a great job trying to make the class more comprehensive given the online format. Just do the homework without help and you will do great. He always said "You may feel like I assign too much homework", but homework never took more than 5 hours per week. It consisted of about 7 problems some more difficult than the others. If you read the book and go over the example problems in the book then the homework will be easy. Overall I spent about 5-7 hours per week doing work outside of class. He does not give many example problems in the class, so be prepared to attend the discussion sections. The TAs ( Sun and Eylul) are also great and discussion is where you learn how to solve problems. The tests are timed, you get 2 hours for the midterm and 3 for the final. Don't bother asking for a 24hr test. Time was not an issue for the midterm. Although I barley finished the final. Overall the class will go well if you put in work, or it will be hard if you don't put in work.

Wow I'm surprised that a review from 9 years ago is still relevant to this day. I am serious when I say that this professor can cure your insomnia. This guy just reads through dry powerpoints with no inputs whatsoever (literally word for word). If you are a normal person don't bother with the lecture and just go to discussions where they actually do practical problems.

I heard this class used to be easy but that is NOT the case during COVID. His test questions were "trick" questions and you're probably out of time before you decipher what do to. The structure of the exams are similar to that of the homework. However, he often takes out variables that are usually given on the homework. This is frustrating because you had no training on how to find those variables and the ways to find them are unclear at the time of taking the exam (which will eat up a lot of time). You look at the solutions afterwards and you will probably think "wow you had to use this formula/do this/that/etc?" As you are reading this review, you might not understand what I'm talking about but once you take your first midterm, you shall come back to this review and reflect on your decision to take this class. Good luck

Lectures: a bit dry but he tells you everything you need to know. He talks directly from the slides and the slides are well-organized and tell you basically all you need to learn

Homework: good length. Doesn't take too long but also really good practice.

Exams: Can be challenging. I would say they tend to be harder than the homework problems, or maybe our class just had a high average.

Overall: though he's not the most engaging lecturer, he's very clear about his expectations and what you need to learn so that it's easy to do well in this class given that you go to lecture, do all the homework, and look over the textbook.

Homework is very heavy on computations while tests are almost entirely conceptual.

Abdou does indeed talk slowly, but it's not a massive detriment. I did find myself mainly taking notes from the slides (or rather having enough time to do that) as a result. His lectures might be compressed to ~1h with a faster rate of speaking. You'll learn *lots* of equations in class, but discussion is semi-mandatory for good reason as you'll learn how to solve problems there. I may have written too much in terms of notes that made it hard to look through; the most important stuff is knowing the equations and doing discussion problems. The problems in discussion are very similar to what you might encounter on a test. Both TAs, Sun and Eylul, were very good. I did less well on the final and forgot to do a homework entirely and still got an A, shouldn't be a hard class to do well in. As a final note it was recommended to me to take this with MAE 103 and I found that to be helpful, as the material in both align near the start of the quarter.

I don't think that the really old reviews for Abdou are that accurate; he's a nice guy and a pretty decent professor. It is true that he speaks very slowly, but the actual content of what he is saying is pretty clear to understand. I also really liked the different slides he used for his lectures, it was really nice to see all the equations laid out clearly and they were easy to refer back to. The material is in theory not the hardest thing in the world, but it does take a lot of practice to build intuition on how you're supposed to approach a problem, because it's not always immediately obvious. I would say his exams aren't vastly more difficult from the homework, and he did give us some old exams for practice that were very helpful. Where this class really shines is with its TAs. Discussion usually included a 20-30 minute recap of the material covered that week and then a few practice problems. The TAs (Sun and Eylul) do a phenomenal job of making the material concise and easy to digest in a clear, structured way, while also giving you pointers and tips on how to solve problems. All in all, this was a pretty decent class and was much better than the old reviews had led me to believe.

Professor Abdou was an alright professor. I went into this class expecting much worse based on the reviews that he had, but it wasn't quite that bad. He only sort of skimmed the surface of a lot of what we needed to know, but there was enough info that he gave and enough info in his lecture slides that you could learn the things you needed to know. The midterm and the final were slightly harder than homeworks, but nothing too crazy. This class just takes a lot of time to learn small details on when to apply things

I at first thought that Abdou was a pretty terrible lecturer, but when I started watching his lectures at 3x speed (which is comparable to 1.75x for a typical talking speed) he actually became pretty good. He claimed that he would curve the class average to about a B+, my poor grade is mostly due to my own poor management, but the difficulty of the tests should not be understated. Average for the midterm was 69 and for the final I expect it was mid 70s. The exams were timed 3 hours despite covid and that was very difficult, the problems are significantly harder than the homework problems; and while I think they made the midterm too long by accident, the final was barely better. The class covers a pretty narrow scope of thermodynamics and focuses a lot on using data tables and on using engineering simplifications to make problems solvable. On the tests you have justify how you use your equations (e.g., saying that a process is reversible so entropy production can be assumed to be only from heat transfer) which is actually pretty hard and I never saw him or the TAs give a lecture on how you're actually supposed to do that. Abdou definitely cares about his students learning and said many times that his goal for the class was for us to become skilled engineers, but he was not the best at making that a reality. He almost exclusively lectured material, and the TAs in discussions covered all the example problems. I've certainly taken better classes, but Abdou still did a decent job as a professor and I would take him again.

not a tough prof. midterm and final were easy as cake, as well as homework. however, don't expect to stay awake in lecture. this guy should market his voice for some sleep aid product. also he just reads his printed out notes which he gives to everyone. midterm and final are very similar to homework problems.