SPAN 120
Literature in Historical Context
Grades
3.32
Average grade awarded in SPAN 120. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
53%
of the 162 letter grades
D, F or W
4.3%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
3%
4 of 5 students passed
The registrar's own records: 162 grades over 4 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 4 terms ran 2.96 to 3.58.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 8 · 4.9%
- A 50 · 30.9%
- A- 28 · 17.3%
- B+ 22 · 13.6%
- B 23 · 14.2%
- B- 11 · 6.8%
- C+ 3 · 1.9%
- C 8 · 4.9%
- C- 2 · 1.2%
- D 4 · 2.5%
- F 3 · 1.9%
- P 4 of 168
- NP 1 of 168
- S 1 of 168
Percentages are of the 162 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P), no-passes (NP), and satisfactory (S).
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 | Summer Session A 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VAN DELDEN, MAARTEN H reviews ↗ | 3.39 | 3.39 | 133 | 3 | 57% | - | not teaching it |
| FUCHS, BARBARA reviews ↗ | 3.10 | 2.96 | 29 | 1 | 34% | - | 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 4 courses long before SPAN 120. Read from Fall 2026, because dibs has not read a class page for SPAN 120 in Summer Session A 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.
From the registrar's catalog
Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisite: course 25 or 27. Introduction to different ways of looking at literary works as historical phenomena. Presentation of major models for writing history—great narratives, cyclic, teleological, sacred, and profane conceptions. Traditional concepts of literary history and problems of mixed categories (historical epochs versus epochs of style, national history, and world literature). P/NP or letter grading.
Sections in Summer Session A 2026
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking SPAN 120 was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.
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