123 appears to help 357 completion

Some good news, here.

On my way home from SIGCSE, I drew some more pictures.

This shows how each year of incoming students handles 357. Specifically, the x axis shows quarters since the students’ first one, and the y axis shows what fraction of the students have passed 357. Each line shows a different cohort.

Some of the lines are longer than others. This is because some cohorts that take a really long time to pass 357, and also because some cohorts haven’t yet had more than 6 or 9 or 12 quarters since entry.

There’s some sobering news here—since 2005, we’ve never managed to heave more than 75% of the students over the 357 bar.

However, looking more closely, we see that more recent cohorts—specifically, those since 2010 (a.k.a. “when we started 123”) look a lot better.

First, the old cohorts:

And here are the cohorts since we added 123:

Looks better, doesn’t it? In fact, there’s no overlap in the 9-qtr outcomes; every year since the change has been better than every year before the change. Also, the most recent ones look like they’re going to be even better.

I’m also interested to see that 123 didn’t actually push 357 back at all; it still looks like the big jump occurs in the winter of the second year.

Yay, us!