The authors conducted an experiment in applying components of the Personal Software Process sm (PSP) described in Humphrey[2,3] to a large group of CS1 students. Half of the students were taught selected PSP principles and the other half were asked only to keep track of total time spent on programming assignments. Results indicate that PSP is of value not only to software professionals involved in large projects, or to students in a software engineering school, but also to novices at the CS1 level, regardless of their background.