DESMA 160
Special Topics in Design | Media Arts: Game History and Analysis
Grades
3.86
Average grade awarded in DESMA 160. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
91%
of the 284 letter grades
D, F or W
0.4%
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: 284 grades over 11 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 11 terms ran 3.68 to 3.95.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 56 · 19.7%
- A 156 · 54.9%
- A- 47 · 16.5%
- B+ 12 · 4.2%
- B 9 · 3.2%
- B- 2 · 0.7%
- C+ 1 · 0.4%
- F 1 · 0.4%
- P 7 of 292
- I 1 of 292
Percentages are of the 284 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P) 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 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MULLER, YOGAN MICHAEL JEAN-PIERRE reviews ↗ | 3.85 | 3.85 | 57 | 3 | 89% | - | not teaching it |
| VESNA, VICTORIA reviews ↗ | 3.88 | 3.89 | 56 | 3 | 93% | - | not teaching it |
| ELLIOTT, BETH ANN reviews ↗ | 3.82 | 3.80 | 45 | 2 | 87% | - | not teaching it |
| MENDEZ, REBECA reviews ↗ | 3.78 | 3.74 | 38 | 2 | 87% | - | not teaching it |
| LUNENFELD, PETER B reviews ↗ | 3.93 | 3.96 | 37 | 2 | 97% | - | not teaching it |
| STERN, EDDO I reviews ↗ | 3.90 | 3.94 | 20 | 1 | 95% | - | not teaching it |
| GOODWIN, DOUGLAS reviews ↗ | 3.85 | 3.84 | 20 | 1 | 90% | - | not teaching it |
| COONEY, ERIN JOY reviews ↗ | 3.90 | 3.97 | 11 · | 1 | 100% | - | 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 1 course long before DESMA 160. Read from Fall 2026, because dibs has not read a class page for DESMA 160 in Fall 2025 and a department can change what it requires. This is a floor, not a deadline: dibs has not read a class page for DESMA 101 and DESMA 104, so the real chain can only be longer than this, never shorter.
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 5 Falls, so it turns up in Fall sometimes rather than dependably.
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
Studio, six hours; outside study, nine hours. Completion of preparation for major and upper-division core courses required. Requisite: course 101 or 104. Selected topics in design and media arts explored through variety of approaches that may include projects, readings, discussion, research papers, and oral presentations. Topics announced in advance. May be repeated for credit with topic change. Letter grading.
Sections in Fall 2025
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking DESMA 160 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.