A Placement Examination in Computer Science

Abstract

Entering college students have widely varying preparation for introductory computer science courses. Proper placement of students in the introductory courses is necessary to give those students with little background in computer programming an opportunity to succeed, while challenging students who may have substantial training and/or programming experience from high school. We have developed and tested a placement examination to help students decide if they should enroll in an introductory course that assumes no previous programming experience, or if they should begin in a course that assumes knowledge of basic programming constructions (Intermediate Programming). Four versions of the examination have been developed in four different languages (FORTRAN, Pascal, C, and BASIC). The score on the placement exam is shown to have predictive power when trying to distinguish, coarsely, between those students who probably will pass the Intermediate Programming course and those students who are at risk of failing t...