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Student Performance in Computing Courses in the face of Growing Enrollments

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Carl BeckfordAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCSE '19: Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

Pages 43 - 48

https://doi.org/10.1145/3287324.3287354

Published: 22 February 2019 Publication History

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Abstract

As computing enrollments have grown in the last decade there have been anecdotal claims from faculty that the discipline has attracted weaker students. To the best of our knowledge the only paper that has studied, and debunked, this claim has been based on data from an exclusive North American university. In this paper we examine data from six courses drawn taught over a 3 year period at a public university in a developing country. We find that in the case of the CS1 course, the distribution of student grades has fluctuated over this period. In addition, courses in object-oriented programming, networking, algorithms and discrete mathematics have also shown variation in student grades. We provide discussion as to why the grades in the courses show variation. We also explain why our findings differ from previous claims of stability in student grades.

References

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Computing Research Association. 2017. Generation CS: Computer Science Undergraduate Enrollments Surge Since 2006. Technical Report. http://cra.org/data/Generation-CS/

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M. Sahami and C. Piech. 2016. As CS Enrollments Grow, Are We Attracting Weaker Students?. In Proc. 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education (SIGCSE '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 54--59.

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Cited By

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Fowler MSmith DZilles CMonga MLonati VBarendsen ESheard JPaterson J(2024)Quickly Producing "Isomorphic" Exercises: Quantifying the Impact of Programming Question PermutationsProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3649217.3653617(178-184)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649217.3653617

Index Terms

Student Performance in Computing Courses in the face of Growing Enrollments
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education
        CS1
      2. Student assessment

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Published In

SIGCSE '19: Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

February 2019

1364 pages

ISBN:9781450358903

DOI:10.1145/3287324

General Chairs:
Elizabeth K. Hawthorne
Union County College, USA
,
Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Sarah Heckman
North Carolina State University, USA
,
Jian Zhang
Texas Woman's University, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 February 2019

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SIGCSE '19

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SIGCSE '19: The 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

February 27 - March 2, 2019

MN, Minneapolis, USA

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SIGCSE '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 169 of 526 submissions, 32%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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SIGCSE TS 2025

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The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

February 26 - March 1, 2025

Pittsburgh , PA , USA

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Fowler MSmith DZilles CMonga MLonati VBarendsen ESheard JPaterson J(2024)Quickly Producing "Isomorphic" Exercises: Quantifying the Impact of Programming Question PermutationsProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3649217.3653617(178-184)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649217.3653617

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Recommendations

Growing Enrollments Require Us to Do More: Perspectives on Broadening Participation During an Undergraduate Computing Enrollment Boom

As CS Enrollments Grow, Are We Attracting Weaker Students?

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