PHILOS 21
Skepticism and Rationality
Grades
3.42
Average grade awarded in PHILOS 21. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
56%
of the 1,144 letter grades
D, F or W
2.1%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
7%
98% of those passed
The registrar's own records: 1,144 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 3.18 to 3.63.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 68 · 5.9%
- A 349 · 30.5%
- A- 227 · 19.8%
- B+ 186 · 16.3%
- B 145 · 12.7%
- B- 71 · 6.2%
- C+ 36 · 3.1%
- C 28 · 2.4%
- C- 10 · 0.9%
- D+ 4 · 0.3%
- D 3 · 0.3%
- F 17 · 1.5%
- P 81 of 1,229
- NP 2 of 1,229
- U 1 of 1,229
- I 1 of 1,229
Percentages are of the 1,144 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P), no-passes (NP), unsatisfactory (U), 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HSU, ANDREW reviews ↗ | 3.42 | 3.42 | 1,144 | 5 | 56% | 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
- Exams mentioned, no number given, said by 5 reviewers
- Quizzes mentioned, no number given, said by 2 reviewers
- Papers mentioned, no number given, said by 3 reviewers
- Problem sets mentioned, no number given, said by 2 reviewers
Read from 40 reviews 26 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
dibs has not read a class page for PHILOS 21 in any term it holds, so it cannot say what comes before it.
Counted in courses rather than quarters: dibs does not know which of them a department lets you take together.
In Winters
Ran in 3 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, four hours; discussion, one hour. Can we know anything with certainty? How can we justify any of our beliefs? Introduction to study of these and related questions through works of some great philosophers of modern period, such as Descartes, Hume, Leibniz, or Berkeley. P/NP or letter grading.
Sections in Winter 2026
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking PHILOS 21 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.