POL SCI 40
Introduction to American Politics
Lecture and discussion.
Fall 2026: 1 lecture and 12 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 3 hours ago.
Grades
3.50
Average grade awarded in POL SCI 40. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
65%
of the 3,402 letter grades
D, F or W
1.9%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
3%
91% of those passed
The registrar's own records: 3,402 grades over 14 terms, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Every instructor is pooled here.
What is inside that record
4 of those terms are summer sessions, and summer sessions are counted here.
The table below splits them, and term averages across those 14 terms ran 3.32 to 3.80.
Historical grades for THOMPSON, DANIEL, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 34 · 3.6%
- A 481 · 50.4%
- A- 133 · 13.9%
- B+ 108 · 11.3%
- B 67 · 7.0%
- B- 36 · 3.8%
- C+ 36 · 3.8%
- C 25 · 2.6%
- C- 13 · 1.4%
- D+ 5 · 0.5%
- D 4 · 0.4%
- D- 8 · 0.8%
- F 5 · 0.5%
- P 13 of 971
- NP 2 of 971
- I 1 of 971
Percentages are of the 955 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P), no-passes (NP), 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 | Fall 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TAUSANOVITCH, CHRISTOPHER NICOLAS reviews ↗ | 3.39 | 3.39 | 1,506 | 5 | 57% | light | not teaching it |
| THOMPSON, DANIEL reviews ↗ | 3.54 | 3.54 | 955 | 4 | 68% | very light | Closed |
| PAYSON, JULIA reviews ↗ | 3.68 | 3.69 | 699 | 2 | 78% | very light | not teaching it |
| EWING, SEAN reviews ↗ | 3.66 | 3.71 | 61 | 2 | 80% | - | not teaching it |
| SHERRER, THOMAS A reviews ↗ | 3.38 | 3.35 | 57 | 1 | 65% | - | not teaching it |
| PRIVETT, CHASE ALLEN reviews ↗ | 3.23 | 3.13 | 50 | 1 | 46% | - | not teaching it |
| COURBE, JACQUES PHILIP reviews ↗ | 3.59 | 3.62 | 40 | 2 | 73% | - | not teaching it |
| PETERS, MARGARET ETHERIDGE reviews ↗ | 3.43 | 3.40 | 34 | 1 | 62% | - | 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 read this course’s reviews and none of them say what kind of work it sets, so dibs has nothing to show rather than a guess. Read from 140 reviews about 1 month ago. That is the reviewers being silent, and not a course that sets no work.
In Falls
Ran in 5 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, three hours; discussion, one hour. Basic institutions and processes of democratic politics. Treatment of themes such as constitutionalism, representation, participation, and leadership coupled with particular emphasis on the American case. 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 13 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.
-
Lec 1 MW 11:00am-12:15pmClosed3.54predicted, this instructor · 955 grades
240 of 240 enrolled high risk
12 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 (12)
-
Dis 1A
W 4:00pm-4:50pm · Public Affairs Building 1264
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1B
W 5:00pm-5:50pm · Public Affairs Building 1264
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1C
W 6:00pm-6:50pm · Public Affairs Building 1264
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1D
W 4:00pm-4:50pm · Bunche Hall 1221A
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1E
W 5:00pm-5:50pm · Bunche Hall 1221A
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1F
W 6:00pm-6:50pm · Bunche Hall 1221A
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1G
W 4:00pm-4:50pm · Public Affairs Building 1284
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1H
W 5:00pm-5:50pm · Public Affairs Building 1284
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1I
W 6:00pm-6:50pm · Public Affairs Building 1284
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1J
W 4:00pm-4:50pm · Public Affairs Building 1329
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1K
W 5:00pm-5:50pm · Public Affairs Building 1329
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Dis 1L
W 6:00pm-6:50pm · Public Affairs Building 1329
Closed20 of 20 enrolled
-
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 176 and 418 a term over 10 terms, summer excluded, most recently 418 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 POL SCI 40 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 · Thompson, D. · 240 of 240 enrolled
Nothing read since 2 Oct, 3 hours ago. Over about 2 months before that, filled by 50.
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.