[Sohcahtoa82]

The fact that so many people are getting CS degrees and yet can't even FizzBuzz is alarming.

Is it the students? How many people are going into CS because they've had a taste of programming somewhere outside of school and decided they want to be a software engineer, and how many of them just get into CS because they heard that CS grads have very good employment prospects (Low unemployment, high salaries)? Anecdotally, I can tell you that during my senior project for my CS degree, someone in my group admitted to hating coding, but was pushed into CS by family, and that he couldn't code worth a damn.

Or is it the schools? In my school, the first two years were much heavier on the code, where the latter two years were heavier on CS theory. But in both cases, the quizzes and tests were on syntax and other things that could be answered with a short answer, or they were multiple choice. The only time your coding ability was tested was in the homework, which is easily plagiarized with Google and Stack Overflow.

[Retric]

Cheating is really rampant in CS degree programs and it’s very difficult to do an actual test of coding skills in a reasonable timeframe rather than pure memorization.

[zsmi]

We had a decent solution to this in my undergraduate school.

Tests were basically all theory. Practical knowledge came from labs and everyone did the majority of their homework on lab computers that had no network connection. Not everyone was a rockstar of course, but as I recall pretty much everyone was at least a passable programmer in the end. Of course that was the early 90s...

[AkshitGarg]

So much of this. In my CS class, I could hardly find anyone who actually had some curiosity to learn. Everyone does their homework by sharing answers on the class chat. And in team projects, either there is one person who does all the work, or they end up copying from google and stackoverflow.

[sangnoir]

> The fact that so many people are getting CS degrees and yet can't even FizzBuzz is alarming.

CS contains more disciplines than just software engineering. Some people get into CS but have no interest/knack for coding: it just doesn't "click" for them the way it does for others, and they will fallback to rote memorization/copy-pasting from StackOverflow to scrape over the line.

I did Calculus 1 & 2 as part of my CS; but today, I don't think I'd be able to solve the FizzBuzz of Calculus, Linear Algebra, (or even the finer points of OS process schedulers if I'm being completely honest). I'd be alarmed if Software Engineering graduates weren't able to solve FizzBuzz