A related question has been bugging me recently: why is there such a mismatch between the expectations of employers and the skills of CS graduates? There turns

A related question has been bugging me recently: why is there such a mismatch between the expectations of employers and the skills of CS graduates? There turns out to be a lot of research from the ACM SIGCSE (Computer Science Education) community. The McCracken Group paper "A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students" and several follow-on studies suggest that getting students to learn programming is truly difficult, a universal observation not just limited to the US. Student performance are often bimodal in intro classes. Also, our conventional assessment tools do not measure programming skill very well. I haven't encountered any data on this, but anecdotally, it seems the expectation gap is considerably different from say the expectation-skill gap in electrical and mechanical engineers. If anyone has any perspective on this, I am really interested in hearing about it. Aside: At least in some (advanced?) compiler courses, we do teach students how to implement exception handling semantics in a compiler. This is of course very different from learning how to use exception handling facilities in a given language.