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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

"According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F’s in spring 2026"

Alternatively, more students are taking CS10 and CS61A irrespective of aptitude.

Anyone can code, but not everyone can become an employable SWE.

Anyone who has first or second hand experience with Cal or any other university knows how impacted CS majors have become, and how everyone is attempting to become a CS major because it's the easiest path to multiple high paying white collar careers.

And in all honesty, it's not like CS@Cal never had weedout classes (I remember CS70, CS61B, and Math54 had reputations of being the L&S weedout classes).

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Spring 2026 saw a marked shift in student performance. We saw it in intro physics courses on the East coast too. I bet anyone who cared to look saw it.

I'm not denying that. I'm just wondering if anyone measured if there is a correlation effect being induced by CS major declaration requirements.

Barely over a decade ago, CS tended to be a large but not too large major by enrollment in most universities yet nowadays it is the most in-demand major in most universities. You can see this at Stanford [0], but most other programs as well.

[0] - https://stanforddaily.com/2020/04/25/stanford-in-the-2010s-t...

The failure rate tripled. So no, it’s not CS major declaration requirements.

> The failure rate tripled

And did the rate of students attempting to declare CS also triple?

> So no, it’s not CS major declaration requirements

Are intending CS majors in your university required to take that specific physics class before declaring the degree?

No.

No. CS majors take a different physics sequence at my institution.

The proximate cause is the wide release of somewhat effective AI tooling. When the tools weren't able to do or explain, students didn't use them. Now the tools are somewhat competent, so students do use them.

The students didn't substantially change from Fall 2025 to Spring 2026. You can have whavever gatekeeping hobby-horse you want, but it's not germane to this particular conversation.

Yep, I'm starting to hear this more and more. Matches my local data. It's a very massive and visible shift in DFW rates.

I'm at a public southeastern R2. Not selective. Mostly regional catchment. Most of our students have to learn how to be good students their first year or two.

We're making major changes in course structure as a result, so if things go well we won't have enough data to measure any kind of meaningful trend

My son took CS10 a couple years ago, and even I (Masters in EECS from UCB) struggled with some really obtuse multiple-guess questions he showed me on the homeworks. Much of the classwork is done in Snap, a weird and stupid graphical "programming" language. If 1/3 of the students are failing, that may have more to do with the professor.

The question comes sooner than the students being tested on the job market. Another possibility is that dropping standardized testing was a net bad idea.

This is orthogonal to standardized testing.

At UC Berkeley L&S, students are undeclared by default, and everyone is incentivized to take the intro CS classes (CS10, CS61A) irrespective of aptitude because worst case they can declare a CS minor or use the classes for other adjacent degrees (eg. Applied Math, Data Science).

Additionally, while Cal doesn't require standardized tests, most students who applied and attended already took the SAT, ACT, and APs becuase they cross-applied to other universities as well. This is reflected in UC Berkeley's HS Weighted GPA being in the 4.31-4.65 range [0], which means most students will have taken at least 6 AP classes.

Hell, I attended an Ivy and even then Cal was a target program for me, as well as my peers. If I didn't get into my Ivy I would have ended up at Cal and ended up in the same position.

[0] - https://admissions.berkeley.edu/apply-to-berkeley/student-pr...

CS is now in the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society instead of the College of Letters & Science

Huh. TIL Cal started a College of Computing in 2023 with direct admissions into CS.

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