COMM 173
Affect and Emotion in Political Communication
Lecture. The registrar has published a final exam time.
Fall 2026: 1 section. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 2 hours ago.
Grades
3.52
Average grade awarded in COMM 173. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
63%
of the 212 letter grades
D, F or W
1.4%
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: 212 grades over 3 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 3 terms ran 3.42 to 3.65.
Historical grades for SOROKA, STUART NEIL, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 26 · 12.3%
- A 61 · 28.8%
- A- 46 · 21.7%
- B+ 22 · 10.4%
- B 38 · 17.9%
- B- 11 · 5.2%
- C+ 3 · 1.4%
- C 2 · 0.9%
- F 3 · 1.4%
- P 1 of 215
- I 2 of 215
Percentages are of the 212 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 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOROKA, STUART NEIL reviews ↗ | 3.52 | 3.52 | 212 | 3 | 63% | very light | Closed by the department |
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.
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. There is growing body of work in political communication that emphasizes importance of affect, emotion, and personality in politics. Sensitivity to threat or disgust; reactions of fear, anger, or happiness; tendency to focus more on negative than on positive information—each of these can impact feelings about candidates, and positions on wide range of domestic and foreign issues. Many of these feelings are in reaction to mass-mediated information; and changing media technologies likely increases volume of affective or emotional content reaching public. Review of recent work on these themes, drawn from both media psychology and political communication. Letter grading.
Sections in Fall 2026
Seat counts as of . Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.
-
Lec 1 MW 11:00am-12:15pmClosed by the department
Soroka, S.N. and Hwang, J.
3.52predicted, this instructor · 212 grades80 enrolled no history
Final enrollment, averaged across each term's sections: between 61 and 78 a term over 3 terms, summer excluded, most recently 78 in Fall 2024. That is the shape across years, not this term, which is above.
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking COMM 173 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 Fall 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 · Soroka, S.N. and Hwang, J. · 80 enrolled
Nothing read since 1 Oct, 2 hours ago. Over about 1 month before that, filled by 6.
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.