COM SCI 181
Theory of Computing
Lecture and discussion.
Summer Session A 2026: 1 lecture and 2 discussions. 1 lecture and 1 discussion are open. The oldest of these readings was 30 days ago.
Grades
3.17
Average grade awarded in COM SCI 181. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
42%
of the 2,145 letter grades
D, F or W
5.9%
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: 2,145 grades over 15 terms, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Every instructor is pooled here.
What is inside that record
2 of those terms are summer sessions, and summer sessions are counted here.
The table below splits them, and term averages across those 15 terms ran 2.53 to 3.53.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 283 · 13.2%
- A 530 · 24.7%
- A- 97 · 4.5%
- B+ 301 · 14.0%
- B 350 · 16.3%
- B- 226 · 10.5%
- C+ 79 · 3.7%
- C 112 · 5.2%
- C- 41 · 1.9%
- D+ 25 · 1.2%
- D 23 · 1.1%
- D- 19 · 0.9%
- F 59 · 2.8%
- I 5 of 2,150
Percentages are of the 2,145 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 | Summer Session A 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MEKA, RAGHU reviews ↗ | 3.37 | 3.37 | 1,036 | 5 | 41% | light | not teaching it |
| SHERSTOV, ALEXANDER reviews ↗ | 2.73 | 2.72 | 603 | 4 | 35% | very light | not teaching it |
| SAHAI, AMIT reviews ↗ | 3.34 | 3.35 | 346 | 4 | 54% | average | not teaching it |
| BATISTA, SANDRA reviews ↗ | 3.26 | 3.27 | 160 | 2 | 53% | 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 7 reviewers
- Problem sets mentioned, no number given, said by 6 reviewers
Read from 124 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 5 courses long before COM SCI 181. Read from Fall 2026, because dibs has not read a class page for COM SCI 181 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, two hours; outside study, six hours. Enforced requisite: course 180. Designed for junior/senior Computer Science majors. Finite state machines, context-free languages, and pushdown automata. Closure properties and pumping lemmas. Turing machines, undecidability. Introduction to computability. Letter grading.
Sections in Summer Session A 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 3 readings. That term is over, so nothing has moved since.
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Lec 1 MW 2:00pm-4:00pmOpen
Aliyari, S.
3.18predicted, all instructors · 2,145 grades8 seats left. 82 of 90 enrolled -
not checked yet2 discussions, 1 open: Dis 1A, F 12:00pm-2:00pm.
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 59 and 249 a term over 13 terms, summer excluded, most recently 184 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 181 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 Summer Session A 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 · Aliyari, S. · 82 of 90 enrolled
Unchanged over 2 minutes
Both readings say 82 of 90.
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.