Does it help to have some programming experience before beginning a computing degree program?

Abstract

There is an intuitive perception that students with prior programming experience have an initial advantage in an introductory programming course, but that this advantage may decrease over the duration of the course if the style of programming is different from what the student has learnt previously. This paper reports on a study that indicates that students who have experience in at least one programming language at the beginning of an introductory programming course perform significantly better in the assessment than those with none, and that the more languages with which a student has experience, the better the performance tends to be.