[nonameiguess]

Not gonna say it's a scam, but it's quite a stretch to call this science. Your paper only has this snippet about this experiment at the University of Utah. The actual paper about that experiment is here: https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/ieeeSoftwar.... It's not a real paper. It's a non peer-reviewed submission of a few pages with no formal methods section and no statistical analysis, its title makes clear it is explicitly being submitted as a work of advocacy, and two of the authors are consultants owning private practices selling programming methodology solutions to businesses.

Given they don't have a real methods section, I guess we'll never know, but the vague description of how they did seems to imply they split the class into people who completed assignments alone and people who completed them in groups of two. This does not seem to meet any definition of "pair programming" I would consider familiar to me. It sounds like a self-organizing team of two. How they split up work is not explained, but there is nothing here to indicate it was two people working at the same time with one typing and one watching for every line of code, just that two people were responsible for the same assignment as one person in the control group.

[rileymat2]

I agree with all your points.

And you can see with further googling, the results of better sources are all over the place. I did not cherry pick that one, it was just a sort of lazy google, look for a top result that was not clearly a blog.

I am just kind of frustrated at the seemingly poor science in the industry. But as I posted elsewhere, the "jelling" process rung true. Which complicates all kinds of one shot experiments.