ASTR 4
Black Holes and Cosmic Catastrophes
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 all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 29 · 9.3%
- A 67 · 21.4%
- A- 50 · 16.0%
- B+ 38 · 12.1%
- B 42 · 13.4%
- B- 27 · 8.6%
- C+ 16 · 5.1%
- C 18 · 5.8%
- C- 9 · 2.9%
- D+ 5 · 1.6%
- D 4 · 1.3%
- D- 3 · 1.0%
- F 5 · 1.6%
- P 53 of 379
- NP 5 of 379
- S 1 of 379
- I 7 of 379
Percentages are of the 313 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P), no-passes (NP), satisfactory (S), 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
| Instructor | Predicted GPA | Raw | n | Terms | A range | Workload | Winter 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 | not teaching it |
| 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 Winters
Has not run in Winter in the 3 Winters dibs holds records for, back to Spring 2022. That is 3 years of grade records rather than the course catalog, so it says what has happened and not what the department will do next.
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 Winter 2026
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.