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LIFESCI 30A

Mathematics for Life Scientists

5 units Life Sciences

Sections & times

Lecture and lab. The registrar has published a final exam time.

Fall 2026: 6 lectures and 60 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 3 hours ago.

Grades

3.40

Average grade awarded in LIFESCI 30A. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.

In the A range

64%

of the 8,226 letter grades

D, F or W

5.2%

of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals

Taken pass/no pass

-

the registrar has this letter grade only this term

The registrar's own records: 8,226 grades over 13 terms, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Every instructor is pooled here.

What is inside that record

4 of those terms are summer sessions, and summer sessions are counted here.

The table below splits them, and term averages across those 13 terms ran 2.88 to 3.74.

Historical grades for BENNOUN, STEVE JACK, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.

  • A+ 965 · 26.5%
  • A 832 · 22.8%
  • A- 545 · 15.0%
  • B+ 279 · 7.7%
  • B 279 · 7.7%
  • B- 223 · 6.1%
  • C+ 156 · 4.3%
  • C 121 · 3.3%
  • C- 48 · 1.3%
  • D+ 39 · 1.1%
  • D 48 · 1.3%
  • D- 79 · 2.2%
  • F 31 · 0.9%
  • P 1 of 3,660
  • NP 3 of 3,660
  • I 11 of 3,660

Percentages are of the 3,645 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P), no-passes (NP), and incompletes (I).

How the non-letter outcomes are counted

They are excluded from the GPA entirely rather than scored, because counting a P as a 4.0 would be a fabrication.

By instructor

Predicted GPA, raw average, sample size, terms, A range and the workload reviewers reported for every instructor with a grade record in this course
Instructor Predicted GPA Raw n Terms A range Workload Fall 2026
BENNOUN, STEVE JACK reviews ↗ 3.40 3.40 3,645 6 64% light Closed
SHEVTSOV, JANE reviews ↗ 3.36 3.36 1,586 3 59% light not teaching it
DEEDS, ERIC JAMESON reviews ↗ 3.51 3.51 947 3 70% very light not teaching it
KERANEN, JUKKA PETRI MIKAEL reviews ↗ 3.76 3.77 734 1 84% average not teaching it
SISKAKI, MARIA reviews ↗ 2.96 2.94 636 1 48% - Closed
BOUHADDOU, MEHDI reviews ↗ 3.32 3.31 351 1 58% - not teaching it
LANNAN, RYAN reviews ↗ 2.99 2.91 86 2 44% - not teaching it
HAMMONDS, NAOMI M reviews ↗ 3.49 3.51 82 1 68% - not teaching it
VINET, MICAH reviews ↗ 3.46 3.48 80 1 59% - not teaching it
VENUGOPAL, SHARMILA reviews ↗ 3.69 3.75 79 1 87% average not teaching it
Why Predicted is not the Raw average

“Predicted” is shrunk toward the course average, which is itself shrunk toward the department, so an instructor with a handful of students sits near the course mean rather than topping the list.

Grade records describe outcomes. For what a course is like to take, read student reviews written on dibs below or follow the separate external review link.

Reviews for LIFESCI 30A

Workload and assignments

Work types reported in BruinWalk reviews of this course, across recorded instructors and terms. They may differ from this term's syllabus.

What the work looks like

  • 2 exams, said by 2 reviewers
  • Quizzes mentioned, no number given, said by 3 reviewers
  • Problem sets mentioned, no number given, said by 1 reviewer
  • Group works mentioned, no number given, said by 1 reviewer
  • Presentations mentioned, no number given, said by 1 reviewer
  • Labs mentioned, no number given, said by 3 reviewers

Read from 180 reviews about 1 month ago. dibs counts only what a review actually states, so a kind of work nobody mentioned is absent rather than zero.

Read the source reviews

In Falls

Ran in 5 of the last 5 Falls.

From the terms dibs holds, which start in Fall 2021 and exclude summer. A department can run a course in a quarter it never has before.

From the registrar's catalog

Lecture, three hours; laboratory, two hours. Preparation: three years of high school mathematics (to algebra II), some basic familiarity with computers. Mathematical modeling as tool for understanding dynamics of biological systems. Fundamental concepts of single-variable calculus and development of single- and multi-variable differential equation models of dynamical processes in ecology, physiology, and other subjects in which quantities change with time. Use of computer programming for problem solving, plotting, and dynamical simulation in laboratory. Letter grading.

Sections in Fall 2026

You enroll in the discussion, not the lecture, so a discussion's status is the one that decides whether you get in. A lecture can read open while every discussion under it is full.

Seat counts as of : the oldest of these 66 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.

Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 210 and 370 a term over 9 terms, summer excluded, most recently 336 in Fall 2025. That is the shape across years, not this term, which is above.

From the people who took it

Student reviews

What taking LIFESCI 30A was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.

Write a review

Your experience could be the first.

No student reviews are available to read on dibs for this course yet. Took it? Tell the next person what helped, what was hard, and how you spent your time.

Looking for more perspectives?

External reviews are separate and do not count toward the dibs rating.

Read reviews on BruinWalk

Community guidelines

Seats over time in Fall 2026

How each lecture has filled since dibs first saw it. This course runs 6 lectures; the legend under the chart picks one.

A dot is a reading where something moved: the seat count, the status, or the waitlist.

What a flat run means, and where a line starts

Flat between dots means it did not drift, it held and then jumped, and a line starts when dibs first saw that lecture rather than reaching back before it existed. A lecture that has never moved draws a flat line across the whole window, and one with two or three readings draws a line joining them, which is too few to read a trend from.

Lec 1 · Siskaki, M. · 216 of 216 enrolled

Filled by 81 over about 2 months

216 of 216 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 04:161 Oct 20:00
dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record covers, 97%, and did not look in 6. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 915 of 1089 plotted.216 of 216 enrolled at the newest reading, 15 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 1 Oct 20:00, 135 to 216. dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record here covers, 97%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 6 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 24 September at 15:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 915 hours of this window. Where the drawing is faint or broken, that never means the readings are doubtful. It means the stretch between them is unaccounted for.

Lec 2 · Siskaki, M. · 216 of 216 enrolled

Filled by 81 over about 2 months

216 of 216 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 04:161 Oct 20:00
dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record covers, 97%, and did not look in 6. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 915 of 1089 plotted.216 of 216 enrolled at the newest reading, 15 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 1 Oct 20:00, 135 to 216. dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record here covers, 97%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 6 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 24 September at 15:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 915 hours of this window. Where the drawing is faint or broken, that never means the readings are doubtful. It means the stretch between them is unaccounted for.

Lec 3 · Bennoun, S.J. · 288 of 288 enrolled

Filled by 108 over about 2 months

288 of 288 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 04:161 Oct 20:00
dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record covers, 97%, and did not look in 6. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 915 of 1089 plotted.288 of 288 enrolled at the newest reading, 15 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 1 Oct 20:00, 180 to 288. dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record here covers, 97%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 6 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 24 September at 15:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 915 hours of this window. Where the drawing is faint or broken, that never means the readings are doubtful. It means the stretch between them is unaccounted for.

Lec 4 · Bennoun, S.J. · 216 of 216 enrolled

Filled by 90 over about 2 months

216 of 216 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 04:161 Oct 20:00
dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record covers, 97%, and did not look in 6. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 915 of 1089 plotted.216 of 216 enrolled at the newest reading, 15 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 1 Oct 20:00, 126 to 216. dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record here covers, 97%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 6 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 24 September at 15:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 915 hours of this window. Where the drawing is faint or broken, that never means the readings are doubtful. It means the stretch between them is unaccounted for.

Lec 5 · Lee, C. · 288 of 288 enrolled

Filled by 112 over about 2 months

288 of 288 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 04:161 Oct 20:00
dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record covers, 97%, and did not look in 6. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 915 of 1089 plotted.288 of 288 enrolled at the newest reading, 15 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 1 Oct 20:00, 176 to 288. dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record here covers, 97%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 6 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 24 September at 15:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 915 hours of this window. Where the drawing is faint or broken, that never means the readings are doubtful. It means the stretch between them is unaccounted for.

Lec 6 · Lee, C. · 216 of 216 enrolled

Filled by 85 over about 2 months

216 of 216 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 04:161 Oct 20:00
dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record covers, 97%, and did not look in 6. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 915 of 1089 plotted.216 of 216 enrolled at the newest reading, 15 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 1 Oct 20:00, 131 to 216. dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record here covers, 97%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 6 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 24 September at 15:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 915 hours of this window. Where the drawing is faint or broken, that never means the readings are doubtful. It means the stretch between them is unaccounted for.
How readings and alerts work

A reading and an hourly record are different things, and most charts here hold more of the second missing than present. dibs has taken readings of a section since long before it began keeping an hour-by-hour log of when it looked, so the empty stretches are dibs saying it was not keeping that log yet, not that it looked and found nothing. That is the age of the record and not a fault.

Seat counts show the last successful read, not live availability. Refreshes can be delayed by request limits or upstream interruptions. Watched sections receive priority, but an hourly update for every section is not guaranteed.

The registrar can change a seat count between our checks. Alerts depend on dibs detecting an opening and completing delivery; a quiet watch does not prove that no seat opened. Check the registrar before enrolling.