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CHEM 14A

General Chemistry for Life Scientists I

Sections & times

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

Fall 2026: 2 lectures and 12 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 10 minutes ago.

Grades

3.28

Average grade awarded in CHEM 14A. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.

In the A range

54%

of the 7,658 letter grades

D, F or W

3.5%

of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals

Taken pass/no pass

1%

79% of those passed

The registrar's own records: 7,658 grades over 14 terms, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Every instructor is pooled here.

What is inside that record

2 of those terms are summer sessions, and summer sessions are counted here.

The table below splits them, and term averages across those 14 terms ran 2.84 to 3.95.

Historical grades for LAVELLE, LAURENCE, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.

  • A+ 353 · 11.7%
  • A 660 · 21.8%
  • A- 633 · 20.9%
  • B+ 408 · 13.5%
  • B 307 · 10.1%
  • B- 220 · 7.3%
  • C+ 152 · 5.0%
  • C 137 · 4.5%
  • C- 112 · 3.7%
  • D 18 · 0.6%
  • D- 5 · 0.2%
  • F 23 · 0.8%
  • P 15 of 3,050
  • NP 3 of 3,050
  • I 4 of 3,050

Percentages are of the 3,028 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

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
LAVELLE, LAURENCE reviews ↗ 3.33 3.33 3,028 4 54% average Closed
SCERRI, ERIC ROBERT reviews ↗ 3.09 3.09 2,143 4 44% light not teaching it
RESLAN, RANDA reviews ↗ 3.29 3.29 694 2 62% - not teaching it
OW, FRANKLIN P reviews ↗ 3.29 3.29 675 2 56% average not teaching it
CARAM, JUSTIN RYAN reviews ↗ 3.76 3.78 384 1 86% light not teaching it
WU, ERIC C reviews ↗ 3.36 3.36 352 1 65% very light not teaching it
NAVA, MATTHEW J reviews ↗ 3.26 3.26 349 1 54% - not teaching it
RAMACHANDRAN, ROSHINI reviews ↗ 3.72 3.95 33 1 97% - 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 CHEM 14A

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

Read the source reviews

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. Preparation: high school chemistry or equivalent background and three and one half years of high school mathematics. Requisite: completion of Chemistry Diagnostic Test. Enforced corequisite: Life Sciences 30A or Mathematics 3A or 31A or score of 48 or better on Mathematics Diagnostic Test. Not open to students with credit for course 20A. Introduction to physical and general chemistry principles; atomic structure based on quantum mechanics; atomic properties; trends in periodic table; chemical bonding (Lewis structures, VSEPR theory, hybridization, and molecular orbital theory); coordination compounds; properties of inorganic and organic acids, bases, buffers. 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 14 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.

Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 243 and 358 a term over 12 terms, summer excluded, most recently 339 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 CHEM 14A 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.

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 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 · Lavelle, L. · 340 of 340 enrolled

Filled by 129 over about 2 months

340 of 340 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 04:161 Oct 20:00
dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record covers, 97%, and did not look in 6. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 915 of 1089 plotted.340 of 340 enrolled at the newest reading, 10 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 1 Oct 20:00, 211 to 340. dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record here covers, 97%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 6 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 24 September at 15:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 915 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 · Lavelle, L. · 340 of 340 enrolled

Filled by 129 over about 2 months

340 of 340 · no seats left in its discussions
17 Aug 12:329 Sep 04:161 Oct 20:00
dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record covers, 97%, and did not look in 6. dibs had no hourly record before 24 Sep, which is the other 915 of 1089 plotted.340 of 340 enrolled at the newest reading, 10 minutes ago, and no seats left in its discussions. Seats from 17 Aug 12:32 to 1 Oct 20:00, 211 to 340. dibs read 168 of the 174 hours its hourly record here covers, 97%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 6 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 24 September at 15:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 915 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.