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by kraemate 6141 days ago
Are there any MIT students who would not know these things? Big-O notation etc?
4 comments

From their introductory page:

It covers time complexity, hash tables, binary search trees, and some other things you might learn in 6.046. However, most of the time is devoted to topics you won't learn in class, such as crafty bitwise logic and tricks to solving problems.

The purpose of mentioning the Big-O in that document wasn't to inform about what it is. Rather, it was to note to the candidate not to go into technical detail during the interview (i.e. we like the intuitive version).
Just because you graduated from MIT doesn't mean that you're smart. I find that school is usually about how much you can cram in your head rather than how much you actually know. Most students can parrot back that a quicksort is an O(n log n) algorithm, but fewer will actually be able to explain why or what that even means.
Probably, if the student was not an EECS major. I studied physics there, and Big-O notation was not something that came up. Heat and entropy, however, was things that we talked about a lot.