You should stop using your lack of experience as justification for getting a C in this course . Most people probably come into this program without programming experience , and in any case , the course assumes no prior knowledge . If you ' re spending 2025 hours a week on this course and struggling to get a C , you ' re not doing something right and you need to go back and figure out where you stopped understanding and work from that point onward . Seriously , go back to like chapter 3 and start reading . I ' ve been a TA for 161 . A C is the bottom ~ 15 th percentile not counting those who dropped , which is usually like a quarter of the class . If I were to guess , I would say you probably don ' t understand something basic like how an array or for loop works and it snowballed . That ' s mostly why I failed the first time I attempted CS . I ' m not trying to be rude , just realistic .