Esfandiar Imani

Prof Imani is not a bad finance professor. He lets students have open books and notes during the exam,except the trade-off is the finance project. If you plan to take him, be warned that one or two of his exam questions are ridiculously difficult. He'll ask a question in the exam that were neither talked about or was in the book. You'll have to be a finance genius to get it correct.

Professor Imani just doesn't have any spark. He means well and wants us to learn the material, but I don't think he has any energy for teaching and this makes all of us in the classroom miserable and bored. There are times when I've really tried to wake myself up by becoming involved in the material being presented. That hasn't worked well. It's apparent that he's really not comfortable thinking outside the box. Specifically, when asked a "Why?" question, or one trying to get at understanding of a princple, he does not offer an alternative explanation. Which is difficult because people learn in different ways. On the plus side, he does assign homework each week that gets graded, so there is an incentive to keep up with the material. Also, he seems like a pleasant man. Imani is so predicable when it comes to teaching as well. Every class is lecture on the board. There is no class participation. I don't think I'd even recognize half the people in my class, because the focus is on Imani lecturing. If I had a wish for Imani's future, I'd hope that he could learn different ways to explain things, use real world anecdotes, stimulate class participation, and have interactive classes that stimulate the mind. Maybe Imani needs to take a class on creating a stimulation learning environment.

Imani does puts effort into his class but his lectures are terrible. He lectures directly from the book. He does not draw from his own experiences and there is no interaction between himself and the students during the lecture. He was unable to answer questions that deviated slightly from the text. His exams are as he puts it "a level or two above the course work" His class structure is very good and he stays on course. I enjoyed both the required presentation and project. He did not honor his set offices hours, but was quick to return e-mails.

Give him an "A" for effort. The class was taught very straightforward in a monotone voice which made it difficult to spark interest in this subject. His exams were exactly like the homework problems he assigned every week (I felt like I was in an undergrad class), but luckily, he was a very fair and easy grader, you'll have no problems on the exam if you do the homework. The class project was of no use: an exercise in futility. His real world examples and lectures are straight from the book - you could pretty much read the book and ignore his lectures.