Reviews of professor Alvaro Chavarria

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Know's his material but isn't so great at explaining it. The most difficult part is trying to translate his heavy, monotone accent while also processing the new concepts he's introducing. If you don't read before class, understanding his lectures is all that more difficult. He does drop the occasional physics dad joke, so... There's that.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
He always seemed unsure of himself. Poor explanations for everything.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Dr. Chavarria is a great professor overall! He is quite funny and is willing to answer any question if you go to office hours. The tests are quite hard, and his questions are not super similar to the practice exams. However, he does provide multiple practice exams to practice with and will spend time going through the solutions if you ask.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
He's really irresponsible and disrespectful. His lecture and the textbook(actually just a note) are not helping at all. I have no idea what book he used when he study particle physics, but definitly not the one we are using in class. There no any concrete material we could use. His lecture note just a bunchs of fragments, not helpful at all.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Lectures are very confusing, it's like every time I go to lecture I learn less about physics than I already knew. First 3 lectures he couldn't explain what inertia was and I was confused about it for a whole week.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
I've taken algebra based physics at another college and got an A on every exam. PHYS121 is the same material I've already learned there but with calculus here and there. The first exam I took was not at all like any of the lectures, homework, quiz section, or even the PRACTICE EXAMS. This professor doesn't prepare you at all for exams.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
He is not the best professor. Lectures mainly consist of physics problems that are explained poorly, and/or rushed which makes it hard to grasp the concepts being explained. The best way to succeed in this class would be to read the assigned chapters before every lecture, do the homework early, go to CLUE, and do many practice problems.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
I had never taken physics before and was challenged heavily in this class. The discussions are dry and there is not a lot of thought process that gets explained right. The slides consist of iPad written notes that have way too much going on and it confuses even him. The demos were good though and he does make you laugh sometimes so there is that.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Very arrogant. Lectures are useless. I would not recommend take any lower phys classes with him. He might be better off teaching upper level physics as he is clearly very smart. But probably felt too bored by teaching lower level physics class.