I think this must vary a lot between schools. In my school, SE ended up weeding out quite a few people who couldn't actually program. They were fine at math an

I think this must vary a lot between schools. In my school, SE ended up weeding out quite a few people who couldn't actually program. They were fine at math and "theory," but when it came down to actually programming, they produced garbage which only eventually worked through trial and error. For most other classes, grading was based entirely on test cases so they could still pass with their frankenstein programs. SE was the only course which required the development of a large application and where grading was substantially based on actually looking at the code. For the record, there were 0 essays in my SE class and lots of large, in-depth projects.