In this article, we present the results of two studies regarding the diagnosis of beginning students’ misconceptions in tracing tasks: First, we show that tracing tasks can be used to design items that trigger misconceptions known from literature. We conducted a think aloud study (N = 10) in which participants from two groups of no and minimal prior exposure to programming verbalized their thoughts while taking a test. The results indicate that incorrect answers are supported by thoughts that indicate the respective misconceptions. The second study of novice programmers consists of data from university students (N = 651) at five levels of experience who attended introductory computer science courses. Results indicate that errors made by participants vary across experience levels. It appears as though some misconceptions will occur less prominently after some experience with programming, while others are more persistent, even in more advanced programming novices. Taken together, the results of the study advance our understanding of the prevalence of known misconceptions and offer a preliminary insight into the learning processes that occur at the very beginning of programming education.