There's some discussion of math skills in the article, but the headline courses with huge jumps in failing grades (CS10 and 61A) are pretty math-light. The form

There's some discussion of math skills in the article, but the headline courses with huge jumps in failing grades (CS10 and 61A) are pretty math-light. The former is "CS for poets," the latter is the first CS class for majors - lots of work on scopes, recursion, basic data structures, and, at the end, a simple Scheme implementation. Understanding math well might help a bit, but they're the least mathy classes in the core Berkeley CS curriculum IMO.