[joey_meyer]

I tend to agree with the article. I am a senior, studying computer science and also a tutor at the engineering building on campus. The large majority of students that come in and need help are from the CS1 and CS2 classes. It's really frustrating for me sometimes because these students typically know very little about how at program and they are asked to make decently large/complex programs. As a result they all think programming is this insanely hard field that only geniuses can understand. I tell them that learning programming is like learning a language, to someone that doesn't understand it or is learning it it looks like gibberish. However once you get it, it's just like reading. Unfortunately, most of the students don't believe me and end up not continuing CS.

In addition, at my university I feel like the majority of students who are in the upper level classes with me (CS majors past their second year) got credit for the intro courses in high school. The way I interpret this is, it is a lot more likely for students to continue study CS past the first year if they take high school CS, which is a longer slower moving intro CS course.

I think the intro courses need to be much easier. They are discouraging too many smart students!