COM SCI 281A
Computability and Complexity
Grades
3.91
Average grade awarded in COM SCI 281A. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
96%
of the 24 letter grades
D, F or W
0.0%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
0%
nobody in the record took it pass/no pass
The registrar's own records: 24 grades over 2 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 2 terms ran 3.87 to 3.95.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 7 · 29.2%
- A 11 · 45.8%
- A- 5 · 20.8%
- B+ 1 · 4.2%
Percentages are of the 24 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes.
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 | Winter 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SHERSTOV, ALEXANDER reviews ↗ | 3.84 | 3.91 | 24 | 2 | 96% | - | 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
dibs has not read a class page for COM SCI 281A 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 Winters
Ran in 2 of the last 3 Winters. dibs has no record of it in any quarter since Winter 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, four hours; outside study, eight hours. Requisite: course 181 or compatible background. Concepts fundamental to study of discrete information systems and theory of computing, with emphasis on regular sets of strings, Turing-recognizable (recursively enumerable) sets, closure properties, machine characterizations, nondeterminisms, decidability, unsolvable problems, easy and hard problems, PTIME/NPTIME. Letter grading.
Sections in Winter 2026
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking COM SCI 281A was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.
Your experience could be the first.
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External reviews are separate and do not count toward the dibs rating.