Having taught university students in "computing studies", I'd venture to guess that it isn't that big of a deal for them to go through the motions of the course

Having taught university students in "computing studies", I'd venture to guess that it isn't that big of a deal for them to go through the motions of the course and eek out a pass by acing the essay questions. I don't have any statistics, but I'd guess about half of them would have had a hard time putting two lines of code together. Back then (late nineties), it was the ideal major for people who didn't know what to major in. Enrollment in the UK is down since then because the generation that grew up equating computer science with using microsoft office (thanks to Bill Gates lobbying Tony Blair) has come of age, and the educational authorities are trying desperately to repair the curriculum. The last time I applied for a teaching job (two or three years ago) the curriculum I was expected to teach looked like it could have been written in the eighties. The job went to someone with more teaching experience than me. Edit: I met a former student on the London Underground some years later who wasn't much good at anything in school besides cracking onto his female colleagues, but got serious after that and ended up scoring a decent programming job in finance. Academic performance might not be such a good predictor of later success.