[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.