It's a balancing act. Some portion of computer science education needs to be practical (implementation details), while some portion needs to be pure computer s

It's a balancing act. Some portion of computer science education needs to be practical (implementation details), while some portion needs to be pure computer science (pseudo code). Obviously projects are a good way to measure implementation details, but they are too easily cheated. Every class I took had exams as 80% or more of the grade. Not every class expected accurate syntax on exams, but most expected code rather than pseudo code (typically C).