Since 2014 a linked-courses learning community has been offered for first-year students in selected majors in the School of Computing (SoC). The students selected for the community are from underrepresented populations in computing, and one of the purposes of the community is to build a sense of belonging among participants as this is connected to retention. In Fall 2017, unlike in previous cohorts, students in the community used social media to connect to each other very early in the quarter, producing a strong sense of community among students. The Fall 2017 programming course associated with the community also had an unusual distribution of homework and lab scores versus exam scores, with the former being very strong and the latter, particularly on the final exam, relatively poor. One hypothesis for this gap is that the stronger students were propping up the homework and lab scores of the weaker students, who did not do sufficient independent work on assignments. In this one of the main goals of the programming course, to develop students’ programming competency, was hindered for some students. The interaction between the strong community and the collaboration policy in the course was not anticipated by the programming instructor, causing a success in achieving a sense of belonging among students to result in a failure in technical aspects of the course. Finding ways to instill a sense of personal responsibility in learning community students will be crucial for the future.