As a grad student, I was a TA for an intro Java class, and I remember the students who just didn't get it. It is hard to say why they failed. Most of the wors

As a grad student, I was a TA for an intro Java class, and I remember the students who just didn't get it. It is hard to say why they failed. Most of the worst students fell behind quickly, and never really had a chance to catch up. It would have been interesting if I had had more of a chance to try and figure out where they were stuck and help them out, but I think most of them gave up trying to understand the basics once they realized how far behind they were and just spent their time copying off other students to get a passing grade (many of them were later caught). As far as the article goes, it says that no other successful predictors have been found for programming aptitude, but when I looked at one of the references cited, it didn't even include HS GPA or SAT scores. I would be surprised if there was no correlation there.