CMU’s intro course sounded a lot like CS50. It was in Java, it was relatively slow …. basically it was glorified AP CS. (They also have the unrelated issue that they separate “Computer Science” and “Information Science” into two separate schools, with the latter _really_ applied and the former _really_ theoretical (as theoretical as you can get without doing straight TCS).

Brown, on the other hand, was really surprisingly good. They had almost exactly what you proposed — a number of parallel intro courses of varying difficulty. My friend had actually started one of them (he acted as a TA for it this year) and it was really surprisingly good; taught in Scheme, for one thing, and also going pretty far (further than what I think 6.001 did, certainly). So yeah, if you want to reform intro CS education, go look at Brown.

Actually, back in my day, despite that 6.001 did cover a lot of stuff that I hadn’t been exposed to before, I still felt it moved too slowly, and I desperately wanted a 6.0012 that I could take analogous to 8.012.

On the other hand, there’s a perception with 8.012 that if you want to major in physics you have to take 8.012 and not 8.01, so if 8.012 is targeted at people with previous physics experience, that’s sending the message that you have to have previous physics experience to major in physics. (I don’t know whether that’s actually the case or not. Certainly I didn’t have enough previous physics experience coming in to be able to take 8.012.) Course 6 definitely doesn’t want to send the message that you have to have previous CS experience to major in CS at MIT (and you don’t!).

So much of what you come in with academically is a function of privilege — I look at the kids who went to TJ, or had a huge selection of AP and honors and language courses to choose from, with a huge amount of envy, and I’m hugely lucky to have gotten the 3 AP classes and 7 or so local college classes I got in high school. Even only six years on, it’s now much harder for students at my old high school to get those opportunities, due to a variety of administrative and other changes. A lot of my programming experience comes from having gotten interested in it at a formative age, having parents and grandparents who were willing to guide me as best they could, and just being obsessed with it for a decade or so before coming to MIT. Not everybody gets that. Certainly it would have been much harder for me to do the same thing with physics or math had I wanted to, because even those resources wouldn’t have been available to me.

On some level CS is a more democratic field than physics or math, mostly in that in CS you’re not nearly so locked into an academic career path, and it’s not expected that the brightest 1% of 1% are necessarily going to go academic. (The brightest 1% of 1% are just as likely to swan off and found a startup or work for a Google or something, and even CS academia has a lot more overlap with industry than physics or math academia.)

There must be some way to meet the needs of the top 1% of 1%, without sending a message to the remaining 99% of 1% that you must be in the top 1% of 1% to major in the field.

Unless they revamp the course, I personally think they should require taking 6.00. If you want to test out of it or you took whatever AP class is offered in computer science, that’s all good, and people can take classes starting at the appropriate level rather than everyone being forced to leap ahead or be held behind.

6.01 aims pretty squarely in the middle, which is problematic because I really think the distribution is closer to bimodal. I don’t have data, but it seems like there’s mostly people who hack on kernels and people who have never coded before. I actually found 6.01 extremely worthwhile because I had coded enough to be comfortable coding, but was not an expert and did not know most of the conceptual stuff they taught. I got the impression that most of the rest of the class was either bored or flailing.