2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Computing “gateway” courses, i.e., Programming I (CS1) and Programming II (CS2), in addition to providing the first introduction to the discipline, also present students with foundational knowledge that is critical for success in the discipline. The gateway courses are not only the most critical for retention in the major but also for success in the major. At a relatively large R1 institution with more than 4,300 computing majors, we implemented four interventions known for improving student success rates (which we collectively term “Best Practices” or BP) into computer science (CS) gateway courses: synchronized content, common assessment, hands-on learning, and undergraduate teaching assistants. Over a two-year period, we tracked students (more than 6,000 anonymized student records) who took BP gateway course sections and compared their passing rates in multiple upper-division CS courses to the pass rates of students who took non-BP gateway sections. We also perform ANalysis Of VAriance (ANOVA) on the data to determine if there is a statistically significant connection between enrollment in a BP-gateway CS course and passing an upper-division CS course. We performed these analyses over the same time period to remove external confounding factors such as COVID-19 and the ubiquity of large-language models (LLMs), and additionally confirmed teaching evaluations as a non-confounding factor through subsequent ANOVA analysis. In the end, we found that for all CS upper-division core courses, the pass rate for students who had completed a BP gateway course section were higher than the pass rate for students who did not, and with very few exceptions, this difference was both a double-digit increase and statistically significant. Also, for every course where these interventions were implemented, student success rates improved. These results illustrate that these four BP interventions can create a positive feedback loop when implemented across the board, both improving the success rates of their target gateway course and additionally translating to improved performance in upper-division courses (even those that have not implemented the BPs).