[jean_tta]

More generally some departments, including CS but not only, get away with picking above average students in a given college and letting other departments get the below average students, through things like "weed out courses" or not teaching actually 101 courses but "assuming a lot of background familiarity with computers", to quote what you say.

Difficulty of any given program at the undergraduate level is completely dependent on university policy. Maybe at the research level, you truly need to be more intelligent / harder working / whatever to succeed in math than in art history, but at the college level, you could do for instance:

- cram all that is taught in current undergrad, MA, and PhD (including the thesis) for art history in 4 years

- let CS students graduate if they can write any working program in any language of their choice

Tada! Art history is now the hardest degree in the college where only the best students aren't weeded out out; and CS is the easiest degree there is.

My point being that CS departments assuming prior levels of CS unlike other departments is merely an instance of a larger pattern.

[ghaff]

When I was undergrad, I took a Fortran course. It was basically an intro programming course for non-CS engineering majors. I had taken some BASIC senior year of high school but this course was really literally: We assume you have never touched a computer before. It was 1976, so not a bad assumption.

I'm sure it would be considered a laughable course to teach at an elite school today. (OK. It was a bit harder because we were using punch cards and we had to beg for more computer cycles if we made too many typing errors, but still.) But I'm pretty sure it wasn't because we were a lot dumber back then.

I agree with your basic point though some students do freeze up with even relatively easy math. But, yes, you could put together a relatively easy programming course and call it CS. And liberal arts courses are not necessarily easy today--especially at a good school. You'll be doing lots of reading and writing.

[jean_tta]

> I agree with your basic point though some students do freeze up with even relatively easy math.

That's the opposite of my point, really.

> And liberal arts courses are not necessarily easy today--especially at a good school. You'll be doing lots of reading and writing.

My point was about the "within university" variance of student levels rather than the "between university" variance. I have no doubt that a liberal arts programs in a good university is more selective than the CS program at a particularly non selective university. However, within any given college, I'd be surprised if the liberal arts program manage to get the above average students and the CS/Math/... programs get the below average students.