This applies beyond introductory programming. We faced this in our university's Machine Learning course. The same course was taught both to students from the en

This applies beyond introductory programming. We faced this in our university's Machine Learning course. The same course was taught both to students from the engineering school, which requires a certain number of math courses (Linear Algebra, Calculus, etc.), and in the general college, which had much fewer requirements. The professor was forced to stay surface-level on the math, so the coursework was a task of glueing together code from scikit-learn. Unfortunately, the exams were much easier if you had the mathematical intuition.