[jurassic]

But what level institution are you at? I can easily imagine weak second and third tier CS students who can't code their way out of a paper bag. It looks like Reddit's r/cscareerquestions/ gets questions from a lot of these type of people.

[suresk]

I have a hard time believing the claim. I've certainly seen a fair share of new graduates disappointingly lacking in certain areas (for some reason, this seems to be especially true of those who hold a Masters degree but have no work experience), but managing to graduate without knowing how to do a simple for loop is really, really hard to believe.

The only way I think that would happen would be if they were fairly weak to begin with and had a ton of performance anxiety, but I'd expect that to be exceptionally rare.

[learc83]

I'm at a run of the mill state school (Georgia State--returning after a 6 year hiatus), and I can't imagine how someone who couldn't write that for loop could graduate.

You could maybe pass the intro to CS class (mostly theory, not much programming), but unless you were willing to pay someone else to take tests for you there is absolutely no way you'd make it through data structures, or algorithms.

Even in an intro to MATLAB class I took that was designed primarily for non CS majors (mostly physics and biology majors) that substandard level of programming would have resulted in an F.

[drakeandrews]

I am at a top 10 UK university. One of the people I have been assigned to work on a group project with would probably fail this question, we are end-of-second year students.