To use sudo normally requires the user's password; to edit bashrc does not. So yes, this is a trivial privilege escalation mechanism of a sort. It does require

To use sudo normally requires the user's password; to edit bashrc does not. So yes, this is a trivial privilege escalation mechanism of a sort. It does require though that the user both is allowed to run an interactive shell with sudo, and actually does so, since you have to wait for him to run sudo in bash.