"At my school, it wasn't intro programming courses that weeded out so many CS students, it was sophomore level discrete math. That class had a 50+% failure rate

"At my school, it wasn't intro programming courses that weeded out so many CS students, it was sophomore level discrete math. That class had a 50+% failure rate." At my school, the CS program was designed so that the Intro to Programming class and the Calc I class were filter functions: students had to get at least XX% in one and YY% in the other in order to be admitted to the CS program (and thus be permitted to enroll in the upper level courses required for the degree). As at your school, more students bombed the Calc class than the CS class. There was no effort made at disguising the filtering function of these courses - in fact, when program enrollment was high, XX and YY increased, and when program enrollment fell around 2004-2005 they decreased (at one point YY was 50%, effectively meaning you simply had to pass the class).