UCLA PHYSICS 5C: Physics for Life Sciences Majors: Electricity, Magnetism, and Modern Physics

Sections & times

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

Fall 2026: 3 lectures and 12 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 2 hours ago.

Grades

3.37

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

In the A range

56%

of the 5,652 letter grades

D, F or W

1.9%

of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals

Taken pass/no pass

86% of those passed

The registrar's own records: 5,652 grades over 12 terms, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Every instructor is pooled here.

What is inside that record

No summer session is in that record.

The table below splits them, and term averages across those 12 terms ran 2.98 to 3.59.

Historical grades for SCHRIVER, DAVID, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.

A+ 36 · 9.4%
A 271 · 70.9%
A- 28 · 7.3%
B+ 24 · 6.3%
B 17 · 4.5%
B- 3 · 0.8%
C 1 · 0.3%
F 2 · 0.5%
P 1 of 383

Percentages are of the 382 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P).

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

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
BAUER, DAVID JEFFREY reviews ↗	3.27	3.27	1,077	4	48%	light	not teaching it
TUNG, NATHAN C reviews ↗	3.49	3.49	951	3	64%	light	not teaching it
NIEMANN, CHRISTOPH reviews ↗	3.31	3.31	900	5	52%	light	not teaching it
JIANG, HONG-WEN reviews ↗	3.01	3.00	547	3	33%	-	not teaching it
SHI, QIANHUI reviews ↗	3.47	3.47	520	2	66%	average	Closed
CORBIN, BRENT reviews ↗	2.97	2.95	394	2	32%	heavy	not teaching it
SCHRIVER, DAVID reviews ↗	3.83	3.85	382	2	88%	very light	Closed
NARANJO, BRIAN B reviews ↗	3.29	3.29	363	2	44%	-	not teaching it
ROMBES III, NICHOLAS DEMETRIOS reviews ↗	3.72	3.74	354	1	82%	-	not teaching it
BOZOVIC, DOLORES reviews ↗	3.73	3.77	164	1	80%	light	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 5C

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 202 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 3 courses long before PHYSICS 5C. 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 4 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. Electrostatics in vacuum and in water. Electricity, circuits, magnetism, quantum, atomic and nuclear physics, radioactivity, 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 01 Oct 13:52: the oldest of these 15 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.

Wait lists are not possible because of the three-part structure (lecture, discussion, and laboratory). Students who retake Physics 5C must enroll in all three sections: lecture, discussion, and laboratory. Once enrolled, send an e-mail to mtran@physics.ucla.edu with your name, student ID number, and quarter in which you originally took the laboratory. You will be manually enrolled in the G99 laboratory. Any student attempting to hold a spot for another student is violating Student Conduct Code 102.23d and may be referred to the Office of the Dean of Students. See https://pa.ucla.edu/physics-and-astronomy-enrollment-information.html for more information. Registrar's Class notes. Oldest reading: 20 hours ago. Lec 1 Dis 1B Dis 1D Dis 1A Dis 1C Lec 2 Dis 2A Dis 2D Dis 2B Dis 2C Wait lists are not possible because of the three-part structure (lecture, discussion, and laboratory). Students who retake Physics 5C must enroll in all three sections: Once enrolled, send an e-mail to mtran@physics.ucla.edu with your name, student ID number, and quarter in which you originally took the laboratory. You will be manually enrolled in the G99 laboratory. Any student attempting to hold a spot for another student is violating Student Conduct Code 102.23d and may be referred to the Office of the Dean of Students. See https://pa.ucla.edu/physics-and-astronomy-enrollment-information.html for more information. Registrar's Class notes. Oldest reading: 20 hours ago. Lec 3 Dis 3C Dis 3A Dis 3B Dis 3D

Lec 1 MWF 12:00pm-12:50pm
Closed

Shi, Q.

3.47
predicted, this instructor · 520 grades

176 of 176 · 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
  W 4:00pm-4:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2748
  
  Closed
  42 of 42 enrolled
- Dis 1B
  W 5:00pm-5:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2748
  
  Closed
  42 of 42 enrolled
- Dis 1C
  F 8:00am-8:50am · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
  
  Closed
  46 of 46 enrolled
- Dis 1D
  F 9:00am-9:50am · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
  
  Closed
  46 of 46 · 1 over enrolled
Lec 2 MWF 1:00pm-1:50pm
Closed

Shi, Q.

3.47
predicted, this instructor · 520 grades

178 of 178 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
  R 4:00pm-4:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2748
  
  Closed
  43 of 43 enrolled
- Dis 2B
  R 5:00pm-5:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2748
  
  Closed
  43 of 43 enrolled
- Dis 2C
  F 10:00am-10:50am · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
  
  Closed
  47 of 47 enrolled
- Dis 2D
  F 3:00pm-3:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2434
  
  Closed
  45 of 45 enrolled
Lec 3 MWF 3:00pm-3:50pm
Closed

Schriver, D.

3.83
predicted, this instructor · 382 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.

This limit is on the class, so it applies to all 4 discussions below.
Every discussion, with its time and seats (4)
- Dis 3A
  M 4:00pm-4:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 1434A
  
  Closed
  54 of 54 enrolled
- Dis 3B
  M 5:00pm-5:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 1434A
  
  Closed
  54 of 54 enrolled
- Dis 3C
  T 2:00pm-2:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2748
  
  Closed
  40 of 40 enrolled
- Dis 3D
  T 3:00pm-3:50pm · Physics and Astronomy Building 2748
  
  Closed
  40 of 40 enrolled

Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 142 and 195 a term over 12 terms, summer excluded, most recently 175 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 5C 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 3 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 · Shi, Q. · 176 of 176 · 1 over enrolled

Same seat count, but the status moved and came back and the seat count moved and came back over about 2 months

176 of 176 · no seats left in its discussions

17 Aug 12:329 Sep 02:011 Oct 15:30

dibs read 168 of the 179 hours its hourly record covers, 94%, and did not look in 11. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 905 of 1084 plotted.

Lec 2 · Shi, Q. · 178 of 178 enrolled

Filled by 2 over about 2 months

178 of 178 · no seats left in its discussions

17 Aug 12:329 Sep 02:011 Oct 15:30

dibs read 168 of the 179 hours its hourly record covers, 94%, and did not look in 11. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 905 of 1084 plotted.

Lec 3 · Schriver, D. · 188 of 188 enrolled

Unchanged over about 2 months

188 of 188 · no seats left in its discussions

Both readings say 188 of 188.

17 Aug 12:329 Sep 02:011 Oct 15:30

dibs read 168 of the 179 hours its hourly record covers, 94%, and did not look in 11. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 905 of 1084 plotted.

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.