[whakim]

Counterpoint: I went to an Ivy League school and studied both computer science and a humanities field. I didn't take an intro CS class until my sophomore year and had no prior experience. It was only because of quality/resources - as well as the tremendous effort to cater to folks with any level of background, including none - of that intro class that I continued on. I wish more intro classes in STEM were like this.

[ghaff]

Anecdotally, some schools are making a genuine effort to have a legitimate Intro CS/programming course. As I noted elsewhere, pretty much uniquely among majors outside of the arts, a lot of CS majors are designed in a way that is very unfriendly to people who weren't already hacking on computers a lot.

[tomtheelder]

I feel like I know which Ivy you're talking about, and if I'm right that class has been fantastically designed for that purpose. I _hate_ the idea of a barrier class. Most students are already terrified at the idea of studying STEM. Why on earth would we further discourage them?

[whakim]

Yeah - you've probably got the right one. I think the real thing this shows is that if you teach intro classes well (and try really hard to get people from atypical backgrounds to take those intro classes in the first place), students don't drop out the moment the going gets tough because they feel unsupported and assume STEM "isn't for them." (I certainly was in that category and would never have studied computer science if I had had a different introduction to the subject.) The failure to teach many more intro classes this way is all the more acute at Ivy+ institutions because they're not lacking for resources.