Even within CS education programs, this has a profound impact. You can't design a useful introductory computer science course that works well for everybody. A

Even within CS education programs, this has a profound impact. You can't design a useful introductory computer science course that works well for everybody. A subset of your class has been dabbling with code since childhood, while another subset needs to start from the beginning. Other degree programs don't seem to suffer nearly this extreme level of experience gap within their incoming students. What fraction of incoming mechanical engineering students have had the chance to build a working motor and then take it through a dozen revisions until it works the way they want? It has to be much less than the comparable fraction of CS students. I think this is a big reason for the famous bimodal distribution of outcomes experienced by most introductory CS classes.