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Pass Rates in STEM Disciplines Including Computing

Published: 02 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Vast numbers of publications in computing education begin with the premise that programming is hard to learn and hard to teach. Many papers note that failure rates in computing courses, and particularly in introductory programming courses, are higher than their institutions would like. Two highly distinct research projects have established that average success rates in introductory programming courses world-wide are in the region of 67%. However, there is little published work comparing pass rates in computing courses with those in other STEM disciplines. As institutions continually ask computing educators to justify the atypical failure rates in their courses, a thoroughly researched comparison of this sort could prove useful in demonstrating whether the phenomenon is real, and, if so, whether it extends somewhat beyond the boundaries of individual institutions. This working group will gather information on pass rates in computing courses, particularly introductory programming courses, and in courses at comparable levels in other STEM disciplines. Members of the group will be required to gather the information from their own institutions, and further data will be gathered by way of a broad survey. The data will be analysed to see whether global patterns can be established, and the group will survey the literature to gather and summarise postulated explanations for any difference between pass rates in computing and in other STEM disciplines.

References

[1]
Jens Bennedsen and Michael E Caspersen. 2007. Failure rates in introductory programming. SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 39, 2 (June 2007), 32--36.
[2]
Alison Clear, Janet Carter, Amruth Kumar, Cary Laxer, Simon, and Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas. 2015. Global perspectives on assessing educational performance and quality. In 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2015). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 326--327.
[3]
Alison Clear and Tony Clear. 2014. Introductory programming and educational performance indicators -- a mismatch. In 2014 ITx Conference (ITx 2014). CITRENZ, New Zealand, 123--128.
[4]
Rashina Hoda and Peter Andreae. 2014. It's not them, it's us! Why computer science fails to impress many first years. In 16th Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2014). Australian Computer Society, Inc., Darlinghurst, Australia, 159--162. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2667490.2667509
[5]
Andrew Luxton-Reilly. 2016. Learning to program is easy. In 2016 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2016). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 284--289.
[6]
Andrew Luxton-Reilly, Simon, Ibrahim Albluwi, Brett A Becker, Michail Giannakos, Amruth N Kumar, Linda Ott, James Paterson, Michael James Scott, Judy Sheard, and Claudia Szabo. 2018. Introductory programming: a systematic literature review. In ITiCSE 2018 Working Group Reports (ITiCSE-WGR 2018). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 55--106.
[7]
Dale Parsons, Krissi Wood, and Patricia Haden. 2015. What are we doing when we assess programming?. In 17th Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2015). ACS, Sydney, Australia, 119--127. http://crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV160Parsons.pdf
[8]
Christopher Watson and Frederick WB Li. 2014. Failure rates in introductory programming revisited. In 2014 Conference on Innovation & Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2014). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 39--44.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
    July 2019
    583 pages
    ISBN:9781450368957
    DOI:10.1145/3304221
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 02 July 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. cs1
    2. failure rate
    3. introductory programming
    4. iticse working group
    5. pass rate
    6. stem disciplines

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