I helped out a little with this sort of thing when I was at university and tutoring intro programming papers. From memory, the one thing that is fairly unique t

I helped out a little with this sort of thing when I was at university and tutoring intro programming papers. From memory, the one thing that is fairly unique to programming courses is that they tend to have a more-than-normal bimodal distribution of results (at least, based on my university.) There was only one other course that showed a similar pattern, and it was one that taught computing for biology or something. The two modes tended to come from two groups of people: those who missed classes and failed to catch up, and those who either didn't miss classes, or managed to catch up what they'd missed. It was suggested from this that programming is pretty unique in that the whole course builds on everything that has come before. If you miss a bit in maths, then you might lose a few points on that aspect, but when they move to a different topic, it generally won't depend on what you missed.* However, in a programming course, if you miss constructors, or arrays, or something then you're kinda screwed for the rest of the course if you can't figure it out. We helped deal with this by having specific remedial tutorials where people could come and get help with anything they missed, or were stuck on, etc. IIRC (it was a while ago) this helped pass rates quite well. * there are definitely exceptions, I'm speaking in generalities.