I'm not sure how these students are filtered out at other places, but in Brown's CS department, PhD students are required to pass a "programming comp" that invo

I'm not sure how these students are filtered out at other places, but in Brown's CS department, PhD students are required to pass a "programming comp" that involves a fairly intense week-long programming project. You don't need to be a superstar coder, but you do need to be able to program effectively in order to pass.