MECH&AE 161A
Introduction to Astronautics
Grades
3.83
Average grade awarded in MECH&AE 161A. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
88%
of the 485 letter grades
D, F or W
1.0%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
-
the registrar has this letter grade only this term
The registrar's own records: 485 grades over 5 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 5 terms ran 3.41 to 3.99.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 45 · 9.3%
- A 361 · 74.4%
- A- 21 · 4.3%
- B+ 16 · 3.3%
- B 23 · 4.7%
- B- 3 · 0.6%
- C+ 3 · 0.6%
- C 6 · 1.2%
- C- 2 · 0.4%
- D+ 1 · 0.2%
- D 2 · 0.4%
- D- 1 · 0.2%
- F 1 · 0.2%
Percentages are of the 485 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DAVOYAN, ARTUR R reviews ↗ | 3.83 | 3.83 | 485 | 5 | 88% | light | 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
- No exams, said by 2 reviewers
- 3 quizzes, said by 4 reviewers
- No problem sets, said by 4 reviewers
Read from 14 reviews 17 days ago. dibs counts only what a review actually states, so a kind of work nobody mentioned is absent rather than zero.
What comes first
The chain dibs can see is 6 courses long before MECH&AE 161A. Read from Fall 2026, because dibs has not read a class page for MECH&AE 161A in Spring 2026 and a department can change what it requires. This is a floor, not a deadline: dibs has not read a class page for MATH 3B, 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 Springs
Has not run in Spring in the 4 Springs dibs holds records for, back to Fall 2021. That is 4 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, four hours; discussion, two hours; outside study, six hours. Enforced requisite: course 102. Recommended: course 82. Spaceflight, including two-body and three-body problem, Kepler laws, and Keplerian orbits. Ground track and taxonomy of common orbits. Orbital and transfer maneuvers, patched conics, perturbation theory, low-thrust trajectories, spacecraft pointing, and spacecraft attitude control. Space mission design, space environment, rendezvous, reentry, and launch. Letter grading.
Sections in Spring 2026
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking MECH&AE 161A 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.