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PHYSICS 5A

Physics for Life Sciences Majors: Mechanics and Energy

5 units Physical Sciences

Sections & times

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

Fall 2026: 4 lectures and 16 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 26 minutes ago.

Grades

3.36

Average grade awarded in PHYSICS 5A. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.

In the A range

59%

of the 8,298 letter grades

D, F or W

4.4%

of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals

Taken pass/no pass

<1%

56% of those passed

The registrar's own records: 8,298 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 2.80 to 3.84.

Historical grades for GUTPERLE, MICHAEL, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.

No grade history is available for this professor in this course.

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
TUNG, NATHAN C reviews ↗ 3.37 3.37 2,836 9 61% light Closed
BAUER, DAVID JEFFREY reviews ↗ 3.19 3.19 2,455 9 48% very light not teaching it
SCHRIVER, DAVID reviews ↗ 3.86 3.87 1,286 4 88% very light not teaching it
HUANG, HUAN Z reviews ↗ 3.07 3.06 1,086 6 44% light not teaching it
ROMBES III, NICHOLAS DEMETRIOS reviews ↗ 3.39 3.39 477 2 58% - not teaching it
MCKEOWN, DANIEL FREDERICK reviews ↗ 3.79 3.84 158 1 90% - 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 PHYSICS 5A

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 226 reviews about 1 month ago. That is the reviewers being silent, and not a course that sets no work.

Read the source reviews

What comes first

The chain dibs can see is 2 courses long before PHYSICS 5A. This is a floor, not a deadline: dibs has not read a class page for LIFESCI 30B and MATH 3B, 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; laboratory, two hours. Requisites: Life Sciences 30A, 30B, or Mathematics 3A, 3B, 3C (3C may be taken concurrently). Statics and dynamics of forces, motion, energy, including thermal energy, with applications to biological and biochemical systems. 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 20 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.

Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 170 and 297 a term over 13 terms, summer excluded, most recently 297 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 5A 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 4 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 · Tung, N.C. · 300 of 300 · 1 over enrolled

Filled by 56 over about 2 months

300 of 300 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 10:012 Oct 07:30
dibs read 168 of the 175 hours its hourly record covers, 96%, and did not look in 7. dibs had no hourly record before 25 Sep, which is the other 925 of 1100 plotted.300 of 300 enrolled at the newest reading, 26 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 2 Oct 07:30, 244 to 300. dibs read 168 of the 175 hours its hourly record here covers, 96%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 7 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 25 September at 01:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 925 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 · Tung, N.C. · 300 of 300 enrolled

Filled by 48 over about 2 months

300 of 300 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 10:012 Oct 07:30
dibs read 168 of the 175 hours its hourly record covers, 96%, and did not look in 7. dibs had no hourly record before 25 Sep, which is the other 925 of 1100 plotted.300 of 300 enrolled at the newest reading, 26 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 2 Oct 07:30, 252 to 300. dibs read 168 of the 175 hours its hourly record here covers, 96%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 7 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 25 September at 01:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 925 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 · Gutperle, M. · 300 of 300 · 1 over enrolled

Filled by 46 over about 2 months

300 of 300 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 10:012 Oct 07:30
dibs read 168 of the 175 hours its hourly record covers, 96%, and did not look in 7. dibs had no hourly record before 25 Sep, which is the other 925 of 1100 plotted.300 of 300 enrolled at the newest reading, 26 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 2 Oct 07:30, 254 to 300. dibs read 168 of the 175 hours its hourly record here covers, 96%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 7 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 25 September at 01:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 925 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 · Gutperle, M. · 302 of 302 enrolled

Filled by 42 over about 2 months

302 of 302 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 10:012 Oct 07:30
dibs read 168 of the 175 hours its hourly record covers, 96%, and did not look in 7. dibs had no hourly record before 25 Sep, which is the other 925 of 1100 plotted.302 of 302 enrolled at the newest reading, 26 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 2 Oct 07:30, 260 to 302. dibs read 168 of the 175 hours its hourly record here covers, 96%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 7 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 25 September at 01:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 925 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.