Prior Experience and New IT Students

Abstract

The Information Technology (IT) Department of the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences (GCCIS) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) offers core courses in four threads. These threads cover various subject areas of Information Technology. Increasingly, students enter the IT program with prior programming experience from high school or college courses, work, or from other activities. Several studies, including the authors’ own have indicated that students, who have prior experience, often perform better in the first programming course. Our earlier study verified that using 2002 data and found that after the first course, the experience did not have a significant impact on student performance in subsequent programming courses. In this study, we reexamined the results of our first study with data from 2003 and looked at beginning courses in other core threads to see if the prior experience had a significant impact on those courses.