Can first-year students program yet?
Robert McCartney, Jonas Boustedt, Anna Eckerdal, Kate Sanders, Carol Zander · 2013
The McCracken et al. working group paper is often cited for the proposition that students can't program. In that study, students from four different institutions were each assigned to implement one of three versions of a calculator. More than half of the students failed to produce a program that compiled and executed in the time assigned.