You really need to teach kids how distributed version control works. For reasons I don't quite understand, UCB EECS come out of school with very bad habits. 90% of the UCB grads I've worked with create new branches by creating a directory at the root of the repo, copying code from a different directory and then modify that. I mean sure, if you copy the directory every now and again and check it in at some point, you
do get a series of snapshots of what the code looked like over time, but you lose a lot of GIT's benefits. Same for mercurial. Thankfully they never used BitKeeper or Smalltalk.
Mostly I've seen it used as a way to avoid having to commit code back into a common "branch". I asked one eecs-bro about it and his response was "it's easier than integrating." Okaaaaaay...
I've not seen this kind of thing from grads at other universities, so I think there's someone wandering around poisoning student's expectations about how they'll be expected to co-operate with their peers out in industry.