PHYSICS 5B
Physics for Life Sciences Majors: Thermodynamics, Fluids, Waves, Light, and Optics
Grades
3.42
Average grade awarded in PHYSICS 5B. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
62%
of the 7,166 letter grades
D, F or W
2.9%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
<1%
11 of 16 students passed
The registrar's own records: 7,166 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 3.15 to 3.84.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 888 · 12.4%
- A 2,571 · 35.9%
- A- 962 · 13.4%
- B+ 662 · 9.2%
- B 728 · 10.2%
- B- 409 · 5.7%
- C+ 258 · 3.6%
- C 293 · 4.1%
- C- 184 · 2.6%
- D+ 61 · 0.9%
- D 52 · 0.7%
- D- 14 · 0.2%
- F 84 · 1.2%
- P 11 of 7,238
- NP 5 of 7,238
- I 56 of 7,238
Percentages are of the 7,166 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 | Summer Session A 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAMANI, JOSHUA FRED reviews ↗ | 3.29 | 3.29 | 2,369 | 8 | 55% | light | not teaching it |
| HOLCZER, KAROLY reviews ↗ | 3.84 | 3.85 | 959 | 5 | 89% | light | not teaching it |
| BAUER, DAVID JEFFREY reviews ↗ | 3.28 | 3.28 | 917 | 5 | 53% | light | not teaching it |
| NIEMANN, CHRISTOPH reviews ↗ | 3.23 | 3.23 | 748 | 4 | 49% | very light | not teaching it |
| PAU, JACQUELINE TZE-HO reviews ↗ | 3.45 | 3.45 | 515 | 4 | 58% | average | not teaching it |
| MCKEOWN, DANIEL FREDERICK reviews ↗ | 3.53 | 3.53 | 378 | 2 | 68% | very light | not teaching it |
| MEHTA, MAYANK R reviews ↗ | 3.40 | 3.40 | 360 | 2 | 65% | average | not teaching it |
| MUSUMECI, PIETRO reviews ↗ | 3.53 | 3.54 | 359 | 2 | 68% | - | not teaching it |
| POWELL, IAN EMMANUEL reviews ↗ | 3.35 | 3.35 | 357 | 2 | 57% | - | not teaching it |
| SCHRIVER, DAVID reviews ↗ | 3.83 | 3.87 | 204 | 1 | 89% | - | 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 198 reviews about 1 month ago. That is the reviewers being silent, and not a course that sets no work.
What comes first
The chain dibs can see is 3 courses long before PHYSICS 5B. Read from Fall 2026, because dibs has not read a class page for PHYSICS 5B in Summer Session A 2026 and a department can change what it requires. 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.
From the registrar's catalog
Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour; laboratory, two hours. Requisite: course 5A. Thermal properties of matter, free energy, fluids, ideal gas, diffusion, oscillations, waves, sounds, light, and optics, with applications to biological and biochemical systems. P/NP or letter grading.
Sections in Summer Session A 2026
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking PHYSICS 5B was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.
Your experience could be the first.
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External reviews are separate and do not count toward the dibs rating.