POL SCI 169
Special Studies in Comparative Politics
Lecture and discussion. The registrar has published a final exam time.
Fall 2026: 2 lectures and 6 discussions. 1 lecture and 5 discussions are open. The oldest of these readings was 16 minutes ago.
Grades
3.67
Average grade awarded in POL SCI 169. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
76%
of the 1,314 letter grades
D, F or W
1.6%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
1%
11 of 12 students passed
The registrar's own records: 1,314 grades over 12 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 12 terms ran 3.35 to 3.98.
Historical grades for LOFCHIE, MICHAEL F, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 49 · 8.2%
- A 394 · 66.1%
- A- 68 · 11.4%
- B+ 10 · 1.7%
- B 63 · 10.6%
- B- 3 · 0.5%
- C 7 · 1.2%
- F 2 · 0.3%
- P 1 of 614
- I 17 of 614
Percentages are of the 596 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 | Fall 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LOFCHIE, MICHAEL F reviews ↗ | 3.80 | 3.80 | 596 | 8 | 86% | very light | Closed |
| ROBERTS, TYSON reviews ↗ | 3.37 | 3.35 | 288 | 3 | 49% | very heavy | not teaching it |
| MOUSA, SALMA reviews ↗ | 3.66 | 3.66 | 179 | 3 | 82% | light | Open, 53 seats left |
| MCNAMEE, LACHLAN ANDREW reviews ↗ | 3.84 | 3.87 | 117 | 1 | 91% | average | not teaching it |
| TREJO, ALFREDO reviews ↗ | 3.50 | 3.42 | 35 | 1 | 74% | - | not teaching it |
| PANAGIA, DAVIDE reviews ↗ | 3.48 | 3.35 | 25 | 1 | 68% | - | not teaching it |
| STECHER, ELAYNE RUTH reviews ↗ | 3.74 | 3.79 | 25 | 1 | 80% | - | not teaching it |
| VALENZUELA, NALLELY reviews ↗ | 3.76 | 3.83 | 25 | 1 | 84% | - | not teaching it |
| MICHEL, JULIAN reviews ↗ | 3.56 | 3.43 | 14 · | 1 | 50% | - | not teaching it |
| TREJO, ALFREDO, III reviews ↗ | 3.57 | 3.40 | 10 · | 1 | 50% | - | 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 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 or four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Preparation: two courses in Field IV. Designed for juniors/seniors. Intensive examination of one or more special problems appropriate to comparative politics. 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 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 8 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.
-
Lec 1 TR 9:30am-10:45amClosed3.80predicted, this instructor · 596 grades
75 of 75 enrolled high risk
-
Lec 2 MW 9:30am-10:45amOpen3.66predicted, this instructor · 179 grades
53 seats left. 67 of 120 enrolled low risk
6 discussions, 5 open.
Every discussion, with its time and seats (6)
-
Closed
20 of 20 enrolled
-
Open
9 seats left.
11 of 20 enrolled
-
Open
8 seats left.
12 of 20 enrolled
-
Open
4 seats left.
16 of 20 enrolled
-
Open
14 seats left.
6 of 20 enrolled
-
Open
18 seats left.
2 of 20 enrolled
-
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 56 and 121 a term over 9 terms, summer excluded, most recently 72 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 169 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. 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 · Lofchie, M.F. · 75 of 75 enrolled
Filled by 26 over about 1 month
Lec 2 · Mousa, S. · 67 of 120 enrolled
Filled by 8 over about 1 month
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.