HIST 179A
Variable Topics in History of Medicine: Life After Life: Human Anatomy as Ephemeral Information
Grades
3.94
Average grade awarded in HIST 179A. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
95%
of the 530 letter grades
D, F or W
0.2%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
1%
3 of 3 students passed
The registrar's own records: 530 grades over 8 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 8 terms ran 3.59 to 4.00.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 20 · 3.8%
- A 468 · 88.3%
- A- 16 · 3.0%
- B+ 12 · 2.3%
- B 7 · 1.3%
- B- 2 · 0.4%
- C+ 4 · 0.8%
- F 1 · 0.2%
- P 3 of 538
- S 1 of 538
- I 4 of 538
Percentages are of the 530 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P), 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 | Spring 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZELENY, CHIEN-LING L reviews ↗ | 3.98 | 3.98 | 423 | 5 | 99% | - | not teaching it |
| O'BRIEN, ELIZABETH reviews ↗ | 3.84 | 3.82 | 75 | 2 | 88% | - | not teaching it |
| FRANK JR, ROBERT G reviews ↗ | 3.71 | 3.59 | 32 | 1 | 63% | - | 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.
In Springs
Ran in 2 of the last 4 Springs, so it turns up in Spring sometimes rather than dependably.
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. Designed for juniors/seniors. Topics may include global health, biomedical technologies, gender and medicine, Chinese medicine, psychiatry and mental illness, medicine and empire, epidemics and infectious disease. May be repeated for maximum of 16 units with topic/instructor change. P/NP or letter grading.
Sections in Spring 2026
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking HIST 179A was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.
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