POL SCI 116A
Marxism
Lecture.
Fall 2026: 1 section. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 82 minutes ago.
Grades
3.86
Average grade awarded in POL SCI 116A. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
90%
of the 756 letter grades
D, F or W
0.8%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
<1%
2 of 2 students passed
The registrar's own records: 756 grades over 6 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 6 terms ran 3.54 to 3.99.
Historical grades for BRANSTETTER, JOHN GAVIN, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 421 · 55.7%
- A 205 · 27.1%
- A- 52 · 6.9%
- B+ 39 · 5.2%
- B 16 · 2.1%
- B- 14 · 1.9%
- C+ 2 · 0.3%
- C 1 · 0.1%
- D- 1 · 0.1%
- F 5 · 0.7%
- P 2 of 764
- I 6 of 764
Percentages are of the 756 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BRANSTETTER, JOHN GAVIN reviews ↗ | 3.86 | 3.86 | 756 | 6 | 90% | light | Closed |
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 2 of the last 4 Falls, so it turns up in Fall sometimes rather than dependably.
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). Designed for juniors/seniors. Critical analysis of origins, nature, and development of Marxist political theory. P/NP or letter grading.
Sections in Fall 2026
Seat counts as of . Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.
-
Lec 1 MW 11:00am-12:50pmClosed3.86predicted, this instructor · 756 grades
120 of 120 enrolled high risk
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 115 and 136 a term over 6 terms, summer excluded, most recently 127 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 116A 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 · Branstetter, J.G. · 120 of 120 enrolled
Filled by 24 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.