MATH 273A
Optimization and Calculus of Variations: Basic Optimization Theory
Grades
3.85
Average grade awarded in MATH 273A. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
92%
of the 96 letter grades
D, F or W
0.0%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
0%
nobody in the record took it pass/no pass
The registrar's own records: 96 grades over 5 terms, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Every instructor is pooled here.
What is inside that record
No summer session is in that record.
The table below splits them, and term averages across those 5 terms ran 3.73 to 3.98.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 22 · 22.9%
- A 38 · 39.6%
- A- 28 · 29.2%
- B+ 6 · 6.3%
- B 2 · 2.1%
- S 3 of 102
- U 2 of 102
- I 1 of 102
Percentages are of the 96 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: satisfactory (S), unsatisfactory (U), 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
| Instructor | Predicted GPA | Raw | n | Terms | A range | Workload | Winter 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MONTUFAR CUARTAS, GUIDO FRANCISCO reviews ↗ | 3.82 | 3.82 | 81 | 4 | 90% | - | not teaching it |
| RYU, ERNEST KANG reviews ↗ | 3.88 | 3.98 | 15 · | 1 | 100% | - | 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.
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.
dibs has not read this course’s reviews, so it cannot say what kind of work it sets. That is dibs not having looked. It is not a course without papers or exams, and the reviews linked below are the answer until dibs catches up.
In Winters
Has not run in Winter in the 4 Winters dibs holds records for, back to Fall 2021. That is 4 years of grade records rather than the course catalog, so it says what has happened and not what the department will do next.
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. Introduction to basic optimization theory, recognition of solutions, and geometry of optimization. Some convex analysis, separation hyperplane, and duality theory. Basic optimization algorithms and their rates of convergence. S/U or letter grading.
Sections in Winter 2026
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking MATH 273A was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.
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