alt Hacker NewsThe University I went to has like an 80% acceptance rate so it's not comparable, but I was surprised when I got into 400-level CS classes and there were people who didn't know how to program at all.
Our professor assigned us to write a fast fourier transform, and when we had class next week apparently everyone claimed that it was too difficult so he changed the assignment to "find an implementation online and write about it"
I feel really grateful I graduated before the advent of LLMs because it was really easy to stand out as a good student when the standards are apparently so low.
Side tangent but in the same class he caught people zero-citation copy-pasting from Wikipedia on the papers we were assigned to write, and the guys acted like they had no idea you couldn't do that.
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I went to a 2nd tier state school in the early mid 2000s.
For our senior project class, one group of students successfully incorporated as a startup and sold their project to the city as a SaSS app, and my group ended up open sourcing our cross platform app.
Everyone in the program could code - really well - by the time they got to their junior year. Those who couldn't were weeded out early on.
May have helped they the entire first 2 years were taught in native languages with manual memory management.
In almost any program, it is entirely possible to navigate your degree so that you are allowed to come away with a high GPA but knowing largely nothing useful. There's enough burned out adjuncts, overworked pre-tenure profs, and coasting/research-oriented tenured profs that with some help from upperclassmen and the ability to detect lax professors, that you can manage to get through largely unscathed by learning. Typically to your chagrin/despair as you then begin interviewing.
> Our professor assigned us to write a fast fourier transform, and when we had class next week apparently everyone claimed that it was too difficult so he changed the assignment to "find an implementation online and write about it"
that sounds unbelievable. Not calling you out by any means i'm just shocked! I can comprehend tuning down the difficulty but not to the level of find some code online and write about it.
I went to a state school. The quality varied wildly depending on the department. It was very eye opening in the general English/writing classes when encountering people who couldn't read or write above a 4th grade level. The difference between they're, their, and there was like a riddle to some of them. Of course many didn't make it more than a semester or two.
That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.