COM SCI 161
Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence
Lecture and discussion. The registrar has published a final exam time.
Fall 2026: 2 lectures and 7 discussions. 1 lecture and 2 discussions are open. The oldest of these readings was 18 minutes ago.
Grades
3.36
Average grade awarded in COM SCI 161. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
50%
of the 2,006 letter grades
D, F or W
1.6%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
-
the registrar has this letter grade only this term
The registrar's own records: 2,006 grades over 11 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 11 terms ran 3.07 to 3.64.
Historical grades for VAN DEN BROECK, GUY, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 40 · 4.4%
- A 163 · 17.8%
- A- 166 · 18.1%
- B+ 167 · 18.3%
- B 125 · 13.7%
- B- 95 · 10.4%
- C+ 63 · 6.9%
- C 49 · 5.4%
- C- 22 · 2.4%
- D+ 7 · 0.8%
- D 3 · 0.3%
- F 15 · 1.6%
- I 10 of 927
- DR 2 of 927
Percentages are of the 915 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: incompletes (I) and withdrawals (DR).
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.
Withdrawals are the exception to "excluded": DR is not scored, but it IS counted in the D, F or W figure above, which is reported over the letter grades plus the withdrawals. Pass/no pass and S/U outcomes are outside that figure on both sides.
By instructor
| Instructor | Predicted GPA | Raw | n | Terms | A range | Workload | Fall 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VAN DEN BROECK, GUY reviews ↗ | 3.17 | 3.17 | 915 | 5 | 40% | light | Open, 5 seats left |
| DARWICHE, ADNAN YOUSSEF reviews ↗ | 3.46 | 3.46 | 784 | 4 | 54% | average | not teaching it |
| GU, QUANQUAN reviews ↗ | 3.63 | 3.64 | 307 | 2 | 71% | 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.
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 5 courses long before COM SCI 161. 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.
In Falls
Ran in 4 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, four hours; laboratory, two hours; outside study, six hours. Enforced requisite: course 180. Introduction to fundamental problem solving and knowledge representation paradigms of artificial intelligence. Introduction to Lisp with regular programming assignments. State-space and problem reduction methods, brute-force and heuristic search, planning techniques, two-player games. Knowledge structures including predicate logic, production systems, semantic nets and primitives, frames, scripts. Special topics in natural language processing, expert systems, vision, and parallel architectures. 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 9 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.
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Lec 1 TR 2:00pm-3:50pmOpen3.17predicted, this instructor · 915 grades
5 seats left. 175 of 180 enrolled high risk
4 discussions, 2 open: Dis 1A, F 10:00am-11:50am, and Dis 1B, F 10:00am-11:50am.
This limit is on the class, so it applies to all 4 discussions below.
Every discussion, with its time and seats (4)
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Dis 1A
F 10:00am-11:50am · Renee and David Kaplan Hall 169
Open4 seats left.
56 of 60 enrolled
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Dis 1B
F 10:00am-11:50am · Renee and David Kaplan Hall 135
Open1 seat left.
59 of 60 enrolled
-
Dis 1C
F 12:00pm-1:50pm · Boelter Hall 3400
Closed60 of 60 enrolled
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Dis 1D
F 12:00pm-1:50pm · Moore Hall 100
Waitlist11 of 60 places taken.
no enrollment count published
-
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Lec 91 TR 2:00pm-3:50pmClosed
Van den Broeck, G., Weng, Y., and Shao, Z.
3.17predicted, this instructor · 915 grades19 of 62 enrolled high risk
lecture: open
3 discussions, none open.
This limit is on the class, so it applies to all 3 discussions below.
Every discussion, with its time and seats (3)
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 109 and 232 a term over 11 terms, summer excluded, most recently 117 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 COM SCI 161 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 · Van den Broeck, G. · 175 of 180 enrolled
Freed 5 seats over about 2 months
Lec 91 · Van den Broeck, G., Weng, Y., and Shao, Z. · 19 of 62 enrolled
Freed 2 seats over about 2 months
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.