COM SCI 181
Theory of Computing
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 C 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 C 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 C 2026
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.