PHYSICS 5B
Physics for Life Sciences Majors: Thermodynamics, Fluids, Waves, Light, and Optics
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 32 minutes ago.
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 BAUER, DAVID JEFFREY, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 111 · 12.1%
- A 265 · 28.9%
- A- 106 · 11.6%
- B+ 89 · 9.7%
- B 83 · 9.1%
- B- 96 · 10.5%
- C+ 53 · 5.8%
- C 57 · 6.2%
- C- 31 · 3.4%
- D+ 3 · 0.3%
- D 12 · 1.3%
- D- 1 · 0.1%
- F 10 · 1.1%
- NP 1 of 926
- I 8 of 926
Percentages are of the 917 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | Closed |
| 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. 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. 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 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 MWF 2:00pm-2:50pmClosed3.28predicted, this instructor · 917 grades
198 of 198 · 1 over enrolled high risk
4 discussions, none open. There is no waitlist either, so the only way in is somebody dropping the lecture.
This limit is on the class, so it applies to all 4 discussions below.
Every discussion, with its time and seats (4)
-
Dis 1A
T 12:00pm-12:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
Closed46 of 46 enrolled
-
Dis 1B
T 1:00pm-1:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
Closed46 of 46 enrolled
-
Dis 1C
R 11:00am-11:50am · Physics and Astronomy Building 1434A
Closed59 of 59 enrolled
-
Dis 1D
R 5:00pm-5:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
Closed47 of 47 enrolled
-
-
Lec 2 MWF 4:00pm-4:50pmClosed3.28predicted, this instructor · 917 grades
198 of 198 · 1 over enrolled high risk
4 discussions, none open. There is no waitlist either, so the only way in is somebody dropping the lecture.
This limit is on the class, so it applies to all 4 discussions below.
Every discussion, with its time and seats (4)
-
Dis 2A
T 2:00pm-2:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
Closed46 of 46 enrolled
-
Dis 2B
T 5:00pm-5:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
Closed46 of 46 enrolled
-
Dis 2C
R 10:00am-10:50am · Physics and Astronomy Building 1434A
Closed59 of 59 · 1 over enrolled
-
Dis 2D
R 12:00pm-12:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
Closed47 of 47 enrolled
-
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 172 and 203 a term over 13 terms, summer excluded, most recently 203 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 5B 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 · Bauer, D.J. · 198 of 198 · 1 over enrolled
Filled by 33 over about 2 months
Lec 2 · Bauer, D.J. · 198 of 198 · 1 over enrolled
Filled by 34 over about 2 months
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.