Who drops CS1? (abstract only)
Diane Horton, Michelle L. Craig · 2014
In the interest of better understanding why many students fail to complete CS1 successfully, we analyze a class of 555 CS1 students, 127 of whom either failed or dropped the course. We find that students with previous experience are more likely to pass even if the experience is not a formal programming course. Contrary to intuition, students who drop have enrolled in fewer courses and have fewer hours of non-school commitments than those who stay. We present a classification scheme to categorize student outcomes based on their performance at a course midpoint.