[phist_mcgee]

1. No idea who Prof Stark or CS219 is. Maybe some context here would help.

2. I f a course is super hard, maybe the class isn't 'full' of people who are just doing it to 'be cool, maybe that is your judgement and does not affect reality.

3. Great that you solved Tetris beforehand, but is there a point here? Are you implying that high school you was smarter than university peers?

Sorry, but your post seems a little elitist, even thought it's just an anecdote.

[xyzelement]

Holly crap! First, there's not really a point. The preface to the post is that we're sharing nostalgia, right? Second, the "cool" thing is I got lucky that a test that I nearly blew myself up on happened to be on a subject I had already thought about a lot.

However your #2 is off-base. There was something like 400% the applicants to the CS program in my university in 1999 vs 1998 and I bet that was true across the board. It was because dot-com was the hot shit and CS became a lot of people's default. The CS department had a tough choice between lowering the bar and "turning away business." This is not a controversial thing.

[Aeolun]

It was certainly true in my sort of CS program in 2005, where half the class had disappeared by the end of the first year. And that was after the bubble.