There's some discussion of math skills in the article, but the headline courses with huge jumps in failing grades (CS10 and 61A) are pretty math-light. The former is "CS for poets," the latter is the first CS class for majors - lots of work on scopes, recursion, basic data structures, and, at the end, a simple Scheme implementation.

Understanding math well might help a bit, but they're the least mathy classes in the core Berkeley CS curriculum IMO.

I also think that's one reason.

Where I'm from (Norway), the majority of computer science and software engineering studies do not have the same math requirements as, say, engineering or math/physics/etc. - nor do they have the same amount of math as the latter ones.

When I did my CS classes as an engineering student, I did meet a bunch of students that viewed math as some niche subject only relevant to those that wanted to work with computer graphics, computational stuff, or similar.

Personally, I do believe that math as a discipline has this huge issue of being mostly incomprehensible garbage.

Not because the actual truth encoded in it would be this complex, but because the encoding scheme just sucks.

I see it as a packaging problem that has so far not been painful enough to trigger any meaningful change.

With this LLM-driven collapse, that might finally change.

Idk I'm hopeful.

Math is literally the law of the universe. It makes zero sense that the way that it is taught needs some special brain wiring only found in small chunks of the population to truly click.

Back in the university, I took both math and CS courses and a significant percentage of students seemed interested in neither math nor programming but rather in the jobs they would get afterwards. I didn't notice the same thing with math majors.