CHEM 153B
Biochemistry: DNA, RNA, and Protein Synthesis
Lecture and discussion. The registrar has published a final exam time.
Fall 2026: 1 lecture and 4 discussions. 1 lecture and 2 discussions are open. The oldest of these readings was 3 hours ago.
Grades
3.35
Average grade awarded in CHEM 153B. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
55%
of the 1,707 letter grades
D, F or W
4.0%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
1%
16 of 17 students passed
The registrar's own records: 1,707 grades over 16 terms, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Every instructor is pooled here.
What is inside that record
3 of those terms are summer sessions, and summer sessions are counted here.
The table below splits them, and term averages across those 16 terms ran 2.82 to 3.93.
Historical grades for LAWSON, MICHAEL, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 5 · 1.2%
- A 117 · 27.9%
- A- 86 · 20.5%
- B+ 77 · 18.3%
- B 55 · 13.1%
- B- 27 · 6.4%
- C+ 18 · 4.3%
- C 12 · 2.9%
- C- 9 · 2.1%
- D 9 · 2.1%
- F 5 · 1.2%
- P 1 of 422
- DR 1 of 422
Percentages are of the 420 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P) and withdrawals (DR).
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.
Withdrawals are the exception to "excluded": DR is not scored, but it IS counted in the D, F or W figure above, which is reported over the letter grades plus the withdrawals. Pass/no pass and S/U outcomes are outside that figure on both sides.
By instructor
| Instructor | Predicted GPA | Raw | n | Terms | A range | Workload | Fall 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LAWSON, MICHAEL reviews ↗ | 3.31 | 3.30 | 420 | 3 | 50% | very light | Open, 7 seats left |
| COUREY, ALBERT J reviews ↗ | 3.42 | 3.42 | 276 | 2 | 61% | average | not teaching it |
| LANNAN, RYAN reviews ↗ | 3.27 | 3.27 | 262 | 3 | 54% | very light | not teaching it |
| CHANFREAU, GUILLAUME reviews ↗ | 3.01 | 2.99 | 243 | 3 | 37% | heavy | not teaching it |
| HODKO, DOMAGOJ reviews ↗ | 3.47 | 3.49 | 172 | 1 | 58% | very light | not teaching it |
| TORRES, JORGE reviews ↗ | 3.83 | 3.91 | 97 | 1 | 93% | - | not teaching it |
| PETROVIC, STEFAN reviews ↗ | 3.43 | 3.45 | 81 | 1 | 57% | average | not teaching it |
| CHEN, IRENE reviews ↗ | 3.83 | 3.93 | 79 | 1 | 94% | - | not teaching it |
| FEIGON, JULI F reviews ↗ | 3.03 | 2.96 | 77 | 1 | 30% | heavy | 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 144 reviews 26 days ago. That is the reviewers being silent, and not a course that sets no work.
What comes first
The chain dibs can see is 5 courses long before CHEM 153B. This is a floor, not a deadline: dibs has not read a class page for CHEM 20B, 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; tutorial, one hour. Requisite: course 153A or 153AH. Recommended: Life Sciences 2, 3, and 23L, or 7A and 7B. Nucleotide metabolism; DNA replication; DNA repair; transcription machinery; regulation of transcription; RNA structure and processing; protein synthesis and processing. 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 5 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.
-
Lec 1 MWF 10:00am-10:50amOpen3.31predicted, this instructor · 420 grades
7 seats left. 133 of 140 enrolled high risk
4 discussions, 2 open: Dis 1A, T 9:00am-9:50am, and Dis 1B, T 12:00pm-12:50pm.
Every discussion, with its time and seats (4)
-
Dis 1A
T 9:00am-9:50am · Boelter Hall 5264
Open3 seats left.
32 of 35 enrolled
-
Dis 1B
T 12:00pm-12:50pm · Young Hall 1044
Open4 seats left.
31 of 35 enrolled
-
Dis 1C
W 9:00am-9:50am · Boelter Hall 5272
Waitlist0 of 2 places taken.
35 of 35 enrolled
-
Dis 1D
W 1:00pm-1:50pm · Boelter Hall 5422
Waitlist0 of 2 places taken.
35 of 35 enrolled
-
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 77 and 172 a term over 13 terms, summer excluded, most recently 125 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 153B 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.
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 · Lawson, M. · 133 of 140 enrolled
Nothing read since 2 Oct, 3 hours ago. Over about 2 months before that, freed 7 seats.
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.