MCD BIO 138
Developmental Biology
Lecture and discussion. The registrar has published a final exam time.
Fall 2026: 1 lecture and 9 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 6 hours ago.
Grades
3.74
Average grade awarded in MCD BIO 138. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
82%
of the 1,860 letter grades
D, F or W
0.6%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
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the registrar has this letter grade only this term
The registrar's own records: 1,860 grades over 17 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 17 terms ran 3.14 to 3.99.
Historical grades for CHEN, JAU-NIAN, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 105 · 15.3%
- A 520 · 75.9%
- A- 24 · 3.5%
- B+ 13 · 1.9%
- B 14 · 2.0%
- B- 5 · 0.7%
- C 4 · 0.6%
Percentages are of the 685 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes.
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 | Fall 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CHEN, JAU-NIAN reviews ↗ | 3.93 | 3.93 | 685 | 5 | 95% | very light | Closed |
| RIGUEUR, DIANA reviews ↗ | 3.95 | 3.96 | 438 | 6 | 98% | average | not teaching it |
| HARTENSTEIN, VOLKER reviews ↗ | 3.32 | 3.30 | 351 | 3 | 53% | average | not teaching it |
| FARMER, D'JUAN TYREE reviews ↗ | 3.61 | 3.60 | 244 | 2 | 65% | light | not teaching it |
| LYONS, KAREN MARIE reviews ↗ | 3.51 | 3.48 | 142 | 1 | 66% | heavy | 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 26 days ago. That is the reviewers being silent, and not a course that sets no work.
What comes first
The chain dibs can see is 4 courses long before MCD BIO 138. This is a floor, not a deadline: dibs has not read a class page for CHEM 20B and LIFESCI 23L, so the real chain can only be longer than this, never shorter.
Counted in courses rather than quarters: dibs does not know which of them a department lets you take together.
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; discussion, one hour. Requisites: Life Sciences 3, 4, and 23L, or 7A, 7B, 7C, 23L, and 107. Development of understanding of fundamental molecular mechanisms and cellular activities guiding formation of complex organism from single fertilized egg. Development of model organisms to understand conserved nature of developmental decisions across animal kingdom, distinct features that lead to diversification of animal shape and form during evolution. Origin and roles of stem and progenitor cells in development and maintenance of specific organ systems. Roles of cell shape change, cell death, proliferation, and migration in generating shape of embryo, organs, and tissues. Mechanisms by which cells become different from and communicate with one another to coordinate their activities in time and space in embryo. Special emphasis on experimental approaches used to address these fundamental questions that determine how organized tissues and organs are formed and maintained throughout life of organism. 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 10 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.
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Lec 1 TR 2:00pm-3:15pmClosed3.93predicted, this instructor · 685 grades
162 of 162 · 12 over enrolled high risk
9 discussions, none open. There is no waitlist either, so the only way in is somebody dropping the lecture.
Every discussion, with its time and seats (9)
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Dis 1A
T 4:00pm-4:50pm · La Kretz Hall 100
Closed18 of 18 enrolled
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Dis 1B
T 5:00pm-5:50pm · Slichter Hall 2834
Closed18 of 18 · 2 over enrolled
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Dis 1C
T 6:00pm-6:50pm · Slichter Hall 2834
Closed18 of 18 · 1 over enrolled
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Dis 1D
W 10:00am-10:50am · Mathematical Sciences 7608
Closed18 of 18 · 2 over enrolled
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Dis 1E
W 11:00am-11:50am · Mathematical Sciences 7608
Closed18 of 18 · 2 over enrolled
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Dis 1F
W 12:00pm-12:50pm · Mathematical Sciences 7608
Closed18 of 18 · 2 over enrolled
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Dis 1G
R 8:00am-8:50am · Slichter Hall 2834
Closed18 of 18 enrolled
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Dis 1H
R 9:00am-9:50am · Slichter Hall 2834
Closed18 of 18 · 2 over enrolled
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Dis 1I
R 10:00am-10:50am · Mathematical Sciences 5217
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
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Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 86 and 172 a term over 13 terms, summer excluded, most recently 172 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 MCD BIO 138 was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.
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.
Seats over time in Fall 2026
How each lecture has filled since dibs first saw it.
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 · Chen, J. · 162 of 162 · 12 over enrolled
Same seat count, but the status moved and came back and the waitlist moved and came back over about 2 months
All 25 readings say 162 of 162.
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.