That's kinda the point.

The project I was on at VMware failed because the developers refused to learn how to use a database and just threw an ORM at it.

So I would write on the whiteboard a skeleton method that had a SQL query, explain a simple data reader API, and have them fill it in.

The good candidates got it fast, and then we'd discuss various error conditions and how to handle them.

The bad candidates would get stuck, whine that I didn't allow an ORM, or hallucinate that they could answer with an ORM: IE, the question did it's job.

I think the idea is that if they don't know something basic you can forget about the hard stuff.