Student Performance In Computing Courses In The Face Of Growing Enrollments

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.