How Early Is Early Enough: Correlating Student Performance With Final Grades

Abstract

Student retention is one of the greatest challenges facing computer science programs. Difficulties in an introductory programming class often snowball, resulting in poor student performance or dropping the major completely. In this paper, we present an analysis of 197 students over 6 semesters from 11 sections of an introductory programming class at a private four-year liberal arts university in the southeastern United States. The goal of this research was to find the earliest point in the assessment sequence which could predict final grade outcomes. Accordingly, we measured the degree of correlation between student performance on quizzes, labs, programs, and tests compared to final course grade. Overall, the results show a strong positive correlation for all four assessment modalities. These results hold significance for educators and researchers insofar as the body of computing education research is extended by evaluating the relative effectiveness of early semester subsets of each of the four categories of student data to model class outcomes.