Definitely a good question, and one I wondered a lot when I worked in the field. There's probably something satisfying to certain teachers watching a bunch of

Definitely a good question, and one I wondered a lot when I worked in the field. There's probably something satisfying to certain teachers watching a bunch of reasonably smart kids fail, especially the ones who used to skate through with intuitive understanding of everything until they get to that one class where they might have to apply themselves. There is also a type of student that traditionally tries all combinations of tricks they learned until something gets the green light and these students are probably annoying in office hours, where the TA or professor has to try to understand a very foreign way of approaching problems to tell the student what's wrong, just for the student to add something to their bag of tricks instead of learning the more general principle they are missing. Those students often fail weed-out classes. There may be some students who cannot learn to generalize properly, I do not know. I like what is being asked by the OP. Why do we see it as a benefit to gatekeep and weed out rather than educate? If you get to first year CS or EE without a complete understanding of basic algebra, or first year creative writing without comma-use skills, you have been failed in your previous education. A remedial approach will hopefully get a bunch of students back on level. However, if you get through CS without debugging skills or creative writing without being able to edit and improve piece, then your university failed you. Even those educated with a focus on getting it right the first time will still produce products that need debugging or editing.