what companies should do is ask you to walk them through a piece of code of your choice and discuss that and/or hire you for a month as a contractor and pay you a fair market rate.
I’ve encountered many who graduated from bachelor and even PhD programs without programming skills (even from European universities), so your statement is false.
It also seems pretty weird to assume that a degree or certificate is foolproof for demonstrating programming skills. That seems like a lack of critical thinking skills.
There are obviously candidates that struggle with performing under pressure - even those that have gone completely blank, but through some simple guiding have bounced back.
To be frank, at the schools I studied at, it would be impossible to fake your way through a whole degree, unless you either got someone to impersonate you and take your exams, or you cheated your way through every single exam...but even then, your grades would be a big red flag.
Sure, there are bad programmers out there - but not being able to punch out a line of valid code, after obtaining a whole degree in the subject...seems extremely unlikely - sans the extreme edge cases.
Even the straight E / D students I've worked with managed to cobble together working stuff, without the aid of search engines or stack exchange.
I’ve worked with programmers from Scandinavian university degrees and some sucked. Not sure how they passed, but the degree was 15 years old and this was the early 00s.
also: this is not just the case for scandinavian universities but also the case for universities in most of western europe especially if they are non-private.
besides, companies already ask what university you went to and could get your records and individual class grades and use that combined with number of people fired that had the same degree to figure out if they want to hire you or not. after all, we are in the era of data science?
and instead of paying recruiters lots of money for shuffling word documents around, they can use that money to pay prospective candidates for a month. it will be cheaper.
the real reason for coding interviews is to wear you out so they can pay you less. the problem is that people go along with this clown show instead of simply walking away and doing something else.
i interviewed a while ago at a FAANG where they had a long standing problem related to their OS. i knew the solution because i recently brought a product to market built on top of a similar OS and had to address the same problem.
but it was more important to them i passed their coding test within a few minutes, and that i choose the optimum solution, which can only be found if you can spend an hour thinking about it. i bombed the interview due to not being used to coding interviews and having to talk while i think, and having to do all this in a few minutes.
they are probably still wondering how to fix their problem.
I interviewed a lot of people and quite a few could not implement fizzbuzz.
Huge risk for anyone who currently has a job. I'd much rather the technical interview.