By the way, Atwood in this 2006 blog quotes a part of the paper that says, if we used this predictive test to only admit students who have no risk of failing, then the failure statistics of CS would transform. It kind of SOUNDS like a good thing.
But this is a very common fallacious argument about education and selection: student "failure risk" is not a static innate trait we're trying to detect and exclude based on, it's WHAT WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE CHANGING WITH EDUCATION
The number one place I think about this type of reasoning being used was when the US was arguing against public education as a concept. Poverty is an exceptionally strong predictor of outcomes; so people said, why should we waste our time and money letting poor children go to school? This might seem absurd to us now but it was a very serious, very influential argument
That was immediately disproven by the fact that EDUCATION INTERVENES ON POVERTY
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