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You are looking at Spring 2027. Enrollment for it has not opened, so these are the registrar's early listings. dibs holds 3,658 sections for Spring 2027, read 39 hours ago. Separately, it has finished 2,718 of the 3,572 courses on its current checking list for this term. Future-term coverage is incomplete, so a course with nothing here may simply not have been reached yet. Back to Fall 2026

POL SCI 169

Special Studies in Comparative Politics

4 units

Sections & times

Lecture and discussion.

Spring 2027: 2 lectures and 6 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 22 days 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 all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.

  • A+ 198 · 15.1%
  • A 619 · 47.1%
  • A- 184 · 14.0%
  • B+ 98 · 7.5%
  • B 124 · 9.4%
  • B- 30 · 2.3%
  • C+ 18 · 1.4%
  • C 19 · 1.4%
  • C- 3 · 0.2%
  • D+ 1 · 0.1%
  • D 5 · 0.4%
  • F 15 · 1.1%
  • P 11 of 1,355
  • NP 1 of 1,355
  • S 1 of 1,355
  • I 28 of 1,355

Percentages are of the 1,314 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P), no-passes (NP), 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

Predicted GPA, raw average, sample size, terms, A range and the workload reviewers reported for every instructor with a grade record in this course
Instructor Predicted GPA Raw n Terms A range Workload Spring 2027
LOFCHIE, MICHAEL F reviews ↗ 3.80 3.80 596 8 86% very light not teaching it
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 not teaching it
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.

Reviews for POL SCI 169

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.

Read the source reviews

In Springs

Ran in 3 of the last 4 Springs.

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 Spring 2027

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.

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.

Seats over time in Spring 2027

Read once so far, so there is no line to draw yet.

What turns this into a chart

A second reading is what turns this into a chart: courses come round within about three hours, and a lecture somebody is watching goes to the front of the pass. Watching is on the lecture's own page, not this one.

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.

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.

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