POL SCI 119
Special Studies in Political Theory
Lecture.
Winter 2026: 2 sections. 1 section is open. The oldest of these readings was about 1 month ago.
Grades
3.74
Average grade awarded in POL SCI 119. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
83%
of the 2,509 letter grades
D, F or W
1.6%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
1%
12 of 14 students passed
The registrar's own records: 2,509 grades over 15 terms, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Every instructor is pooled here.
What is inside that record
3 of those terms are summer sessions, and summer sessions are counted here.
The table below splits them, and term averages across those 15 terms ran 3.56 to 4.00.
Historical grades for BRANSTETTER, JOHN GAVIN, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 1,024 · 56.2%
- A 446 · 24.5%
- A- 183 · 10.0%
- B+ 53 · 2.9%
- B 60 · 3.3%
- B- 26 · 1.4%
- C+ 7 · 0.4%
- C 8 · 0.4%
- C- 3 · 0.2%
- D+ 1 · 0.1%
- D 2 · 0.1%
- D- 2 · 0.1%
- F 6 · 0.3%
- P 2 of 1,841
- I 18 of 1,841
Percentages are of the 1,821 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P) 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BRANSTETTER, JOHN GAVIN reviews ↗ | 3.86 | 3.86 | 1,821 | 12 | 91% | light | Closed |
| TROJAN, CODY reviews ↗ | 3.36 | 3.35 | 429 | 4 | 55% | light | not teaching it |
| POOUDOMSAK, VANESSA VASANA reviews ↗ | 3.72 | 3.72 | 133 | 2 | 80% | - | not teaching it |
| ROSS, MICHAEL L reviews ↗ | 3.50 | 3.40 | 43 | 1 | 84% | - | not teaching it |
| PETERS, MARGARET ETHERIDGE reviews ↗ | 3.76 | 3.77 | 33 | 1 | 88% | - | not teaching it |
| CUCHARO, STEPHEN JUDE reviews ↗ | 3.38 | 3.16 | 29 | 1 | 55% | light | not teaching it |
| CAMPBELL, JOSHUA W reviews ↗ | 3.77 | 3.79 | 21 | 1 | 76% | very 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.
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.
What comes first
The chain dibs can see is 1 course long before POL SCI 119. Read from Fall 2026, because dibs has not read a class page for POL SCI 119 in Winter 2026 and a department can change what it requires. dibs has read a class page for every course in it.
Counted in courses rather than quarters: dibs does not know which of them a department lets you take together.
In Winters
Ran in 4 of the last 4 Winters.
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 or four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Preparation: one course in Field I. Requisite: course 10. Designed for juniors/seniors. Intensive examination of one or more special problems appropriate to political theory. Sections offered on regular basis, with topics announced in preceding term. May be repeated for credit with topic change. P/NP or letter grading.
Sections in Winter 2026
Seat counts as of : the oldest of these 2 readings. That term is over, so nothing has moved since.
-
Lec 1 MW 2:00pm-3:15pmClosed3.86predicted, this instructor · 1,821 grades
120 of 120 · 12 over enrolled -
not checked yet -
Lec 2 TR 2:00pm-3:15pmOpen
Norton, A.D.
3.74predicted, all instructors · 2,509 grades1 seat left. 59 of 60 enrolled -
not checked yet
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 119 and 139 a term over 12 terms, summer excluded, most recently 120 in Spring 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 119 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 Winter 2026
How each lecture has filled since dibs first saw it. This course runs 2 lectures; the legend under the chart picks one.
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 · Branstetter, J.G. · 120 of 120 · 12 over enrolled
Unchanged over less than a minute
Both readings say 120 of 120.
Lec 2 · Norton, A.D. · 59 of 60 enrolled
Unchanged over less than a minute
Both readings say 59 of 60.
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.