[jfischer]

At my school (UCLA), there was not a formal requirement for publications or even an informal requirements. It looked like some professors emphasized publications more than others. I think, even if you aren't going into academia, they make a good unit of work and source of external feedback/validation.

My school did replace their Qualifying Examination with a research paper requirement (http://www.cs.ucla.edu/academics/graduate-program/graduate-s...), but it does not have to be published.

Unless things have changed recently, you certainly need more than 3 good publications to get a tenure-track academic position in CS. That means you have to either be a publishing machine while you are a student or do a post-doc.