COM SCI 180
Introduction to Algorithms and Complexity
Lecture and discussion.
Winter 2026: 1 lecture and 4 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was about 1 month ago.
Grades
3.17
Average grade awarded in COM SCI 180. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
42%
of the 2,797 letter grades
D, F or W
2.5%
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: 2,797 grades over 14 terms, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Every instructor is pooled here.
What is inside that record
1 of those terms is a summer session, and summer sessions are counted here.
The table below splits them, and term averages across those 14 terms ran 2.83 to 3.83.
Historical grades for OSTROVSKY, RAFAIL, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 103 · 52.8%
- A 47 · 24.1%
- A- 17 · 8.7%
- B+ 6 · 3.1%
- B 18 · 9.2%
- B- 2 · 1.0%
- C 2 · 1.0%
- I 1 of 196
Percentages are of the 195 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SARRAFZADEH, MAJID reviews ↗ | 3.02 | 3.02 | 1,412 | 7 | 33% | heavy | not teaching it |
| HSIEH, CHO-JUI reviews ↗ | 3.28 | 3.28 | 544 | 2 | 47% | average | not teaching it |
| BATISTA, SANDRA reviews ↗ | 3.24 | 3.25 | 387 | 2 | 42% | average | not teaching it |
| REINMAN, GLENN D reviews ↗ | 3.13 | 3.13 | 234 | 1 | 43% | - | not teaching it |
| OSTROVSKY, RAFAIL reviews ↗ | 3.77 | 3.83 | 195 | 1 | 86% | average | Waitlist, 0 of 30 places taken |
| GAFNI, ELIEZER M reviews ↗ | 3.32 | 3.42 | 25 | 1 | 52% | very heavy | 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
- 1 exam, said by 16 reviewers
- 10 quizzes, said by 4 reviewers
- 6 problem sets, said by 15 reviewers
Read from 120 reviews 16 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
The chain dibs can see is 4 courses long before COM SCI 180. Read from Fall 2026, because dibs has not read a class page for COM SCI 180 in Winter 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.
In Winters
Ran in 4 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, two hours; outside study, six hours. Enforced requisites: course 32, Mathematics 61. Designed for junior/senior Computer Science majors. Introduction to design and analysis of algorithms. Design techniques: divide-and-conquer, greedy method, dynamic programming; selection of prototypical algorithms; choice of data structures and representations; complexity measures: time, space, upper, lower bounds, asymptotic complexity; NP-completeness. Letter grading.
Sections in Winter 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 5 readings. That term is over, so nothing has moved since.
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Lec 1 MW 4:00pm-5:50pmWaitlist3.77predicted, this instructor · 195 grades
0 of 30 places taken. 240 of 240 · 6 over enrolled -
not checked yet4 discussions, none open. The way in is the lecture's waitlist, at 0 of 30.
Every discussion, with its time and seats (4)
-
Dis 1A
F 8:00am-9:50am · Franz Hall 2258A
Waitlist0 of 8 places taken.
60 of 60 · 2 over enrolled
-
Dis 1B
F 8:00am-9:50am · Geology Building 4660
Waitlist0 of 7 places taken.
60 of 60 · 1 over enrolled
-
Dis 1C
F 2:00pm-3:50pm · Kinsey Science Teaching Pavilion 1220B
Waitlist0 of 8 places taken.
60 of 60 · 3 over enrolled
-
Dis 1D
F 2:00pm-3:50pm · Renee and David Kaplan Hall A51
Waitlist0 of 7 places taken.
60 of 60 enrolled
-
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 25 and 353 a term over 13 terms, summer excluded, most recently 173 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 180 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 Winter 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 · Ostrovsky, R. · 240 of 240 · 6 over enrolled
Unchanged over 1 minute
Both readings say 240 of 240.
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.