Elizabeth Patitsas, Jesse Berlin, Michelle Craig, and Steve Easterbrook

Although it has never been rigourously demonstrated, there is a common belief that CS grades are bimodal. We statisti- cally analyzed 778 distributions of final course grades from a large research university, and found only 5.8% of the dis- tributions passed tests of multimodality. We then devised a psychology experiment to understand why CS educators believe their grades to be bimodal. We showed 53 CS pro- fessors a series of histograms displaying ambiguous distri- butions and asked them to categorize the distributions. A random half of participants were primed to think about the fact that CS grades are commonly thought to be bimodal; these participants were more likely to label ambiguous dis- tributions as “bimodal”. Participants were also more likely to label distributions as bimodal if they believed that some students are innately predisposed to do better at CS. These results suggest that bimodal grades are instructional folklore in CS, caused by confirmation bias and instructor beliefs about their students.