The CS program at my university, and most people I've spoken too, wasn't research oriented. At least not until the graduate level. Maybe at really respected pla

The CS program at my university, and most people I've spoken too, wasn't research oriented. At least not until the graduate level. Maybe at really respected places like MIT. Yes there were algorithms classes and such, but it was more about memorization than actually studying how they were made or how you would make a novel one. Final projects were always about building a real-world-ish application on a team. But I'd say about 20% of the students that graduated still didn't understand things like references very well. They'd write their code with "foo.bar" and when it didn't compile they'd randomly change "." to "->" or add random asterisks around until it compiled. (Classes were primarily in C++. We did some classes Java as well, and in my 3rd year Microsoft came in with a big sponsorship to change all the Java classes to C# classes.)