CHEM 156
Physical Biochemistry
Lecture and discussion.
Fall 2025: 1 lecture and 3 discussions. 1 lecture and 1 discussion are open. The oldest of these readings was about 1 month ago.
Grades
3.31
Average grade awarded in CHEM 156. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
52%
of the 932 letter grades
D, F or W
2.8%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
<1%
1 of 1 student passed
The registrar's own records: 932 grades over 11 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 11 terms ran 2.95 to 3.74.
Historical grades for RODRIGUEZ, JOSE ALFONSO, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 19 · 5.7%
- A 126 · 37.6%
- A- 104 · 31.0%
- B+ 43 · 12.8%
- B 25 · 7.5%
- B- 10 · 3.0%
- C+ 2 · 0.6%
- C- 3 · 0.9%
- D+ 2 · 0.6%
- D- 1 · 0.3%
- I 2 of 337
Percentages are of the 335 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: 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 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CLUBB, ROBERT THOMPSON reviews ↗ | 3.06 | 3.05 | 375 | 4 | 39% | - | not teaching it |
| RODRIGUEZ, JOSE ALFONSO reviews ↗ | 3.63 | 3.65 | 335 | 4 | 74% | light | Open, 1 seat left |
| QUINLAN, MARGOT ELIZABETH reviews ↗ | 3.20 | 3.19 | 160 | 2 | 36% | light | not teaching it |
| YEATES, TODD O reviews ↗ | 3.32 | 3.33 | 62 | 1 | 48% | 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 not read this course’s reviews, so it cannot say what kind of work it sets. That is dibs not having looked. It is not a course without papers or exams, and the reviews linked below are the answer until dibs catches up.
What comes first
The chain dibs can see is 5 courses long before CHEM 156. Read from Fall 2026, because dibs has not read a class page for CHEM 156 in Fall 2025 and a department can change what it requires. 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 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, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisites: courses 110A, 153A. Biochemical kinetics; solution thermodynamics of biochemical systems; multiple equilibria; hydrodynamics; energy levels, spectroscopy, and bonding; topics from structural, statistical, and electrochemical methods of biochemistry. P/NP or letter grading.
Sections in Fall 2025
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 4 readings. That term is over, so nothing has moved since.
-
Lec 1 MTWF 10:00am-10:50amOpen3.63predicted, this instructor · 335 grades
1 seat left. 89 of 90 enrolled -
not checked yet3 discussions, 1 open: Dis 1C, R 3:00pm-3:50pm.
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 63 and 119 a term over 11 terms, summer excluded, most recently 89 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 156 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 2025
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 · Rodriguez, J.A. · 89 of 90 enrolled
Unchanged over 1 minute
Both readings say 89 of 90.
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.