However, it is very easy to cheat your way through college and obtain good grades. My assessed coursework regularly shows up on rentacoder.com and similar. There is an industry out there for writing dissertations. Group work is another mechanism that weak programmers use to avoid getting better: they let the good programmers do all the programming and then do documentation, or UI design, or nothing.
In addition, there is a pronounced grade inflation, so even weak students look great on paper.
Not every organisation has the know-how to filter out weak students that look great on paper.
My degree program must have been unusual, then, because my senior project class was the only one where less than 80% of my grade came from in-class tests. Many professors didn't even give a crap whether you actually did the homework or not, because you'd bomb the test anyway if you didn't.
However, it is very easy to cheat your way through college and obtain good grades. My assessed coursework regularly shows up on rentacoder.com and similar. There is an industry out there for writing dissertations. Group work is another mechanism that weak programmers use to avoid getting better: they let the good programmers do all the programming and then do documentation, or UI design, or nothing. In addition, there is a pronounced grade inflation, so even weak students look great on paper.
Not every organisation has the know-how to filter out weak students that look great on paper.