[_delirium]

I agree it's tricky to do anything about it without seeming absurd, but I can also see the motivation. One semester isn't very long, so it's easy for incoming knowledge to completely swamp whatever a course could teach in 14 weeks. But if the goal of CS101 is to put people on track to a CS degree, and the purpose of grading is to give some indication of performance, having CS101 grades completely dominated by incoming knowledge rather than some sort of signal of ability-to-learn seems unfortunate.

On the other hand, this is true to some extent in other fields. For example, hobbyist writers, which these days includes kids who write long-form blog pieces, will tend to breeze through introductory portions of humanities curricula, since grades are often dominated by simple writing ability. If you can already throw together a coherent 5-page essay without having to learn how as a freshman, you're way ahead of the average 1st-year.

[klipt]

By the same token, a hobbyist robotocist would breeze through engineering courses. I'm sure there are good ways to deal with unequal skills - why not let the skilled people test out of the class and save time getting to a more advanced class?

But the way the article frowns on prior preparation as "gaming the grading system" hints at a desire to trample down the tall poppies rather than to improve everyone's experience.

[robryan]

I'd say it's true in almost every field. Usually the person with previous programming experience because they were interested to self guide themselves through it will be the better programmer and may stay that way all throughout college. They may get higher marks but it certainly isn't hard enough that those just coming in can't pass also.