Couple things : 1) different colleges have wildy different expectations and learnibg material. I went to a very small school with a high waulity cs education.

Couple things : 1) different colleges have wildy different expectations and learnibg material. I went to a very small school with a high waulity cs education. I was amazed by my friends that went to bigger schools, id often have to study 3x more than them for the same grade, and their course material was basically constantly 1 semester lagging. 2) youre interviewing juniors. Major concepts in CS really started to "click" for me and my cohort towards the end of junior year. I think this is about when you have enough exposure to really start to grok big fundamental topics 3) a lot of students do not learn the fubdamentals and just hobble along to get the degree. I couldnt believe some of the shit my friends didnt know after getting the same degree as I did. Stuff like they still didnt understand pointers, couldnt explain tcp vs udp, etc.