And he found a new job at a freagin bank as a senior engineer 2 weeks later. Because "a network of people asserted he knew his stuff".
(As to how he got hired in the first place...people "asserted he knew his stuff" and I assume he was pretty good at tricking people in interviews. Interview process sucked, mind you, but since people will get fussy if you ask them to code in an interview, well...)
It also creates a prestige problem for whatever university graduated some nitwit who can't code from a CS degree. Over time, it will be harder for other graduates from that university to find work.
I'm amazed by comments like this, frankly. It reminds me of how far computer science is from being a genuine profession. Would anyone say stuff like this about the contents of architecture or engineering courses?
Coincidentally, this is being discussed in another thread today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14440780
Companies need to filter their applicants because some colleges don't do a good job filtering their graduates.
Almost no one proceeds under the illusion that it's a comprehensive education. At best, you'll master a subfield in graduate school.
Continuous grading provides a valuable signal when you need to step up your game, transition to a different field, or drop out. I know several people whose poor CS grades sent them to tracks where they're now much happier and more successful.
It's a lot easier to determine if you are capable from "my GPA is x" rather than having someone sit down and write code for a few hours and doing a code review.
Then they're brought in for a technical interview. There's no escaping that. You don't give automatically give them a job because they listed a 4.0 GPA on their CV and were nice on the phone.
In programming, this is a significant amount of people.
Surely you don't believe turning in someone else's work for an assignment counts as learning. At some level, we do need to know whether a student has learned the material. We assign homework because a) it's more efficient than lab assignments b) adult students grasp concepts best by doing. We grade them because we believe more students will do the work that leads to learning, because the students themselves want high grades (well, employers and scholarships do).
I'd be happy to see someone try to teach an intro to CS course in a US flagship state school with homework optional, and grades purely based on tests. Would that meet your definition of student learning?
For some it's mostly the former, for others the latter. It depends on the majors chosen and a bunch of other factors.
The research in education is difficult to parse the individuals decision comes from which (some show that signalling does play a big part, though).
My personal opinion is that, as more people get higher education, it becomes more of a signal -- the value of the signal of the degree is lessened, and by extension, the value of not having the degree is lessened even more. See the "Spence signalling model" for more on this.
So you get dumbed down classes in the long run.
For example, I didn't want to go to grad school or work for a megacorp, so I didn't have to worry about my grades. But a lot of my classmates did want those things, which require large scale impersonal evaluation, so they had to sweat about their grades.