PHILOS 8
Introduction to Philosophy of Science
Grades
3.62
Average grade awarded in PHILOS 8. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
71%
of the 1,497 letter grades
D, F or W
1.0%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
3%
98% of those passed
The registrar's own records: 1,497 grades over 5 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 5 terms ran 3.30 to 3.80.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 282 · 18.8%
- A 556 · 37.1%
- A- 220 · 14.7%
- B+ 157 · 10.5%
- B 122 · 8.1%
- B- 76 · 5.1%
- C+ 36 · 2.4%
- C 31 · 2.1%
- C- 2 · 0.1%
- D+ 3 · 0.2%
- D 6 · 0.4%
- F 6 · 0.4%
- P 46 of 1,547
- NP 1 of 1,547
- I 3 of 1,547
Percentages are of the 1,497 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P), no-passes (NP), and 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 | Fall 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SMITH, SHELDON RUSSELL reviews ↗ | 3.70 | 3.70 | 598 | 2 | 79% | light | not teaching it |
| KHALIFA, KAREEM E reviews ↗ | 3.69 | 3.69 | 590 | 2 | 75% | very light | not teaching it |
| ELLIOTT, KATRINA JEANINE reviews ↗ | 3.32 | 3.30 | 309 | 1 | 47% | 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
- No exams, said by 4 reviewers
- 10 quizzes, said by 3 reviewers
- 2 papers, said by 3 reviewers
Read from 76 reviews 26 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
dibs has not read a class page for PHILOS 8 in any term it holds, so it cannot say what comes before it.
Counted in courses rather than quarters: dibs does not know which of them a department lets you take together.
In Falls
Ran in 3 of the last 4 Falls. dibs has no record of it in any quarter since Fall 2024.
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, three hours; discussion, one hour. Study of selected problems concerning the character and reliability of scientific understanding, such as nature of scientific theory and explanation, reality of theoretical entities, inductive confirmation of hypotheses, and occurrence of scientific revolutions. Discussion at nontechnical level of episodes from history of science. P/NP or letter grading.
Sections in Fall 2026
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking PHILOS 8 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.
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External reviews are separate and do not count toward the dibs rating.