PHYSICS 1A
Physics for Scientists and Engineers: Mechanics
Lecture and discussion. The registrar has published a final exam time.
Fall 2026: 2 lectures and 8 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 2 hours ago.
Grades
3.11
Average grade awarded in PHYSICS 1A. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
42%
of the 4,710 letter grades
D, F or W
5.4%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
1%
52% of those passed
The registrar's own records: 4,710 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 2.81 to 3.52.
Historical grades for CORBIN, BRENT, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A 195 · 44.0%
- A- 15 · 3.4%
- B+ 18 · 4.1%
- B 129 · 29.1%
- B- 16 · 3.6%
- C+ 8 · 1.8%
- C 38 · 8.6%
- C- 8 · 1.8%
- D+ 6 · 1.4%
- D 1 · 0.2%
- F 9 · 2.0%
- P 3 of 451
- NP 4 of 451
- I 1 of 451
Percentages are of the 443 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
| Instructor | Predicted GPA | Raw | n | Terms | A range | Workload | Fall 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KAMAHA, ALVINE reviews ↗ | 2.89 | 2.89 | 912 | 5 | 39% | light | not teaching it |
| VASSILIEV, VLADIMIR V reviews ↗ | 3.26 | 3.26 | 881 | 5 | 37% | average | not teaching it |
| KUSENKO, ALEXANDER reviews ↗ | 2.95 | 2.94 | 708 | 2 | 35% | light | not teaching it |
| TUNG, NATHAN C reviews ↗ | 3.30 | 3.30 | 525 | 4 | 54% | light | not teaching it |
| CORBIN, BRENT reviews ↗ | 3.25 | 3.25 | 443 | 3 | 47% | average | Closed |
| SALTZBERG, DAVID reviews ↗ | 2.97 | 2.97 | 299 | 2 | 37% | average | not teaching it |
| BAUER, DAVID JEFFREY reviews ↗ | 2.92 | 2.90 | 197 | 2 | 36% | - | not teaching it |
| GELMINI, GRACIELA BEATRIZ reviews ↗ | 3.28 | 3.30 | 164 | 1 | 43% | heavy | not teaching it |
| ZOCCHI, GIOVANNI reviews ↗ | 3.74 | 3.81 | 149 | 1 | 89% | average | not teaching it |
| WILLIAMS, GARY A reviews ↗ | 2.88 | 2.85 | 145 | 1 | 26% | heavy | not teaching it |
| GUTPERLE, MICHAEL reviews ↗ | 3.16 | 3.17 | 122 | 1 | 39% | average | not teaching it |
| TODERI, MARTIN ALEJANDRO reviews ↗ | 3.25 | 3.28 | 83 | 2 | 54% | very light | not teaching it |
| TSERKOVNYAK, YAROSLAV reviews ↗ | 2.99 | 2.96 | 82 | 1 | 33% | - | 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.
What the work looks like
- 3 exams, said by 2 reviewers
- 5 quizzes, said by 1 reviewer
- Problem sets mentioned, no number given, said by 1 reviewer
Read from 534 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.
What comes first
The chain dibs can see is 3 courses long before PHYSICS 1A. dibs has read a class page for every course in it.
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/demonstration, four hours; discussion, one hour. Enforced requisites: Mathematics 31A, 31B. Enforced corequisite: Mathematics 32A. Motion, Newton laws, work, energy, linear and angular momentum, rotation, equilibrium, gravitation. P/NP or 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 8:00am-9:50amClosed3.25predicted, this instructor · 443 grades
188 of 188 enrolled high risk
4 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 (4)
-
Dis 1A
T 2:00pm-2:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 1434A
Waitlist0 of 2 places taken.
55 of 55 enrolled
-
Dis 1B
T 3:00pm-3:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 1434A
Waitlist1 of 2 places taken.
55 of 55 enrolled
-
Dis 1C
W 4:00pm-4:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
Closed39 of 39 enrolled
-
Dis 1D
W 5:00pm-5:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
Waitlist0 of 2 places taken.
39 of 39 enrolled
-
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Lec 2 MTWF 4:00pm-4:50pmClosed by the department
The Staff
3.11predicted, all instructors · 4,710 gradesno enrollment count published no history
4 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 (4)
-
Dis 2A
W 8:00am-8:50am · Boelter Hall 5420
Closed by the departmentno enrollment count published
-
Dis 2B
W 9:00am-9:50am · Boelter Hall 5273
Closed by the departmentno enrollment count published
-
Dis 2C
R 8:00am-8:50am · Boelter Hall 5280
Closed by the departmentno enrollment count published
-
Dis 2D
R 9:00am-9:50am · Boelter Hall 5280
Closed by the departmentno enrollment count published
-
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 134 and 187 a term over 13 terms, summer excluded, most recently 187 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 PHYSICS 1A 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. This course runs 2 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 · Corbin, B. · 188 of 188 enrolled
Nothing read since 1 Oct, 2 hours ago. Over about 2 months before that, filled by 36.
Lec 2 · The Staff · -
Nothing read since 1 Oct, 2 hours ago. Over about 2 months before that, unchanged.
Both readings say 0 seats.
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.