MCD BIO 50
Stem Cell Biology, Politics, and Ethics: Teasing Apart Issues
Grades
3.78
Average grade awarded in MCD BIO 50. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
84%
of the 1,203 letter grades
D, F or W
0.7%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
2%
90% of those passed
The registrar's own records: 1,203 grades over 12 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 12 terms ran 3.56 to 3.93.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 50 · 4.2%
- A 760 · 63.2%
- A- 200 · 16.6%
- B+ 87 · 7.2%
- B 53 · 4.4%
- B- 29 · 2.4%
- C+ 12 · 1.0%
- C 4 · 0.3%
- C- 1 · 0.1%
- D+ 4 · 0.3%
- D 3 · 0.2%
- P 26 of 1,233
- NP 3 of 1,233
- DR 1 of 1,233
Percentages are of the 1,203 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P), no-passes (NP), and withdrawals (DR).
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.
Withdrawals are the exception to "excluded": DR is not scored, but it IS counted in the D, F or W figure above, which is reported over the letter grades plus the withdrawals. Pass/no pass and S/U outcomes are outside that figure on both sides.
By instructor
| Instructor | Predicted GPA | Raw | n | Terms | A range | Workload | Summer Session A 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LEE, PEIYUN reviews ↗ | 3.77 | 3.77 | 987 | 9 | 84% | light | not teaching it |
| AUSTIN, TINA ROSA reviews ↗ | 3.82 | 3.82 | 216 | 3 | 85% | very light | 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 read this course’s reviews and none of them say what kind of work it sets, so dibs has nothing to show rather than a guess. Read from 116 reviews about 1 month ago. That is the reviewers being silent, and not a course that sets no work.
From the registrar's catalog
Lecture, three and one half hours; discussion, 90 minutes. Developmental biology of various types of human stem cells. Important functional differences between embryonic, hematopoietic, and adult stem cells, as well as differences in their biomedical potentials. Discussion of history of debate surrounding embryos, as well as various social, ethical, political, and economic aspects of stem cell research. P/NP or letter grading.
Sections in Summer Session A 2026
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking MCD BIO 50 was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.
Your experience could be the first.
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