ASTR 4
Black Holes and Cosmic Catastrophes
Lecture and discussion. The registrar has published a final exam time.
Fall 2026: 1 lecture and 3 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 2 hours ago.
Grades
3.18
Average grade awarded in ASTR 4. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
47%
of the 313 letter grades
D, F or W
5.4%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
16%
91% of those passed
The registrar's own records: 313 grades over 6 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 6 terms ran 2.62 to 3.52.
Historical grades for LARKIN, JAMES E, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 19 · 16.8%
- A 35 · 31.0%
- A- 15 · 13.3%
- B+ 10 · 8.8%
- B 13 · 11.5%
- B- 6 · 5.3%
- C+ 8 · 7.1%
- C 2 · 1.8%
- D+ 1 · 0.9%
- D 1 · 0.9%
- F 3 · 2.7%
- P 18 of 132
- S 1 of 132
Percentages are of the 113 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P) and satisfactory (S).
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SHAPLEY, ALICE EVE reviews ↗ | 3.18 | 3.18 | 134 | 2 | 40% | average | not teaching it |
| LARKIN, JAMES E reviews ↗ | 3.37 | 3.40 | 113 | 2 | 61% | very light | Closed |
| MALKAN, MATTHEW ARNOLD reviews ↗ | 2.87 | 2.79 | 66 | 2 | 36% | average | 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.
What the work looks like
- Exams mentioned, no number given, said by 4 reviewers
- Quizzes mentioned, no number given, said by 2 reviewers
- Problem sets mentioned, no number given, said by 1 reviewer
Read from 64 reviews about 1 month ago. dibs counts only what a review actually states, so a kind of work nobody mentioned is absent rather than zero.
In Falls
Ran in 4 of the last 4 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. No mathematical preparation beyond that necessary for admission to UCLA in freshman standing. Course for general UCLA students, normally not intending to major in physical sciences. Introduction to exotic cosmic phenomena known as black holes, and their bizarre effects on fabric of space and time. Some black holes form in violent events that terminate lives of stars, while formation of much more massive black holes at centers of galaxies is still mysterious. Covers cosmic catastrophes including stellar explosions and mergers, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and gravitational waves. Discussion of depiction of black holes in popular culture. 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 4 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.
-
Lec 1 MWF 1:00pm-1:50pmClosed3.37predicted, this instructor · 113 grades
90 of 90 enrolled high risk
3 discussions, none open. There is no waitlist either, so the only way in is somebody dropping the lecture.
Every discussion, with its time and seats (3)
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 32 and 85 a term over 6 terms, summer excluded, most recently 85 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 ASTR 4 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 · Larkin, J.E. · 90 of 90 enrolled
Nothing read since 2 Oct, 2 hours ago. Over about 2 months before that, filled by 11.
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.