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Maybe course withdrawal rates could be used, but getting access to the necessary statistics seems like it'd be a chore. I just checked with my university and the only statistics I can find are centered around graduation rates. One would likely have to contact all the registrars among a sample of universities individually, as I haven't found a university offering these statistics yet.

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CS Educators do this research all the time, but it's pretty challenging to design a CS1 class that's effective but also so radically different from the typical paradigm.

There's also a risk you'll set students back if it's not effective so there are definitely ethical concerns and it requires interrupting a professor's load for the quarter. That said, CS educators conduct research like this all the time and there's probably a lot of value in studying this kind of change.

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