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<p>Sleep problems, mostly.</p>
<p>I guess my point was not necessarily that the son would not have some success with CS later on, but that given his intelligence, and supposed relative lack of distractions, he should have had no reason to end up with a 2.6 in his best subject, so maybe he should try and look into what he’s actually best at. That is, I disagree with the notion that a 2.6 is perfectly good for a CS major and he will do great in the major; I think it’s a sign of deeper troubles.</p>
<p>I’m also not that optimistic when it comes to improving CS grades that much. While the son might improve substantially in the future and suddenly understand CS, my personal opinion is that the probability of this occurring is very slim. The reason is that in my experience, and in the experience of the CS people I know, the difficulty of classes increases much faster than a student’s adjustment rate. And the grading never seems to get any easier (in fact, it gets harder considering graders will put more and more weight on fast/efficient coding and documentation, not a good thing when simply getting the programs to compile, not to mention actually work, takes hours on end). I went into functional programming with an A in the last class in the sequence, and I felt totally lost throughout the first 2 months of the course; I wonder how a person who got a C/D in that last class would’ve fared? I just don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a person who struggled heavily in a course to suddenly perk up and totally rock the next class in the sequence, at least in CS. At least, this is the experience me and my CS acquaintances had.</p>