Yes, if you read the first Dartmouth BASIC documentation you immediately understand that Kurtz and Kemeny were designing a language that students could teach themselves, with the goal of them being able to transition to Fortran.
Amusingly, my physics and math classes all used FORTRAN, but my teachers were OK with me translating the programs to BASIC so I could run them on my crude MS-DOS computer. I had a copy of the IBM FORTRAN compiler, but it was this cumbersome beast that required two diskettes -- one contained the compiler and the other contained the linker, or something like that. And the complete compile/link workflow took several minutes. BASIC, and then Turbo Pascal, were game changing because you could run a program instantly.
BASIC even had crude array math via the MAT statement though I don't recall the details.
I got to my senior year, second semester, and had a meeting with my advisor to make sure I had met all of my graduation requirements. He looked at my record and said: "Hey, you were supposed to take a programming class. But you know how to program, don't you?" I said yes. He checked the box to waive that requirement for me. Then I started breathing again.
