[analog31]

I can't dispute the author's statistics, after all, they're just a function of the data. But looking at the first graph, it seems like a generous interpretation of "predict." The anticipated signal-to-noise for any individual student looks like it would be pretty poor.

One other thought occurs to me. Would the same algebra test produce similar correlations with courses such as English and History, when adjusted for the differences in overall pass rates for those subjects?

It seems odd that something as interesting as programming isn't introduced until college. That seems like accepting students as music majors, who have never played music before. If I had my druthers, computation and simplistic programming would be part of the mainstream K-12 curriculum.