Disclosure: I work on curriculum matters for WeThinkCode_. I like the exercise in the article and I'll be proposing we add it to the Java curriculum. I'd be surprised (and not in a good way) if the majority of our students fail to make it work.

You're contradicting yourself. In real life you're not given the tests that you must pass. So which one is it? Do you think it should be closer to real life, or do you think you should be given tests? I get the sense the real answer is you'd just want interviews to be easier.

Program source was released a month before the exam, to allow students to familiarise themselves with it, and the exam then gave a series of questions/modifications the students had to make (I think ours was based on a pack of cards, so we had to implement a shuffle algo, and a take x from top of deck, etc).