Most never "earn their chops" in a traditional sense. These days, it would seem earning your chops is done by running create react app, cobbling together several dozen random javascript libraries and putting out a laughably designed website in a few days.
The Georgia Tech cs2130 class, languages and translation, the third required cs class for the major, was notorious as being a weeder course around 1999. The professor made it clear that there would be no partial credit for code that could be core dumped by the teaching assistants. If you weren't good at the class you should probably look forward to writing business applications for IBM, allegedly. So some people used to be hardcore on this subject.
Always glad to see someone else who remembers that era at GT!
CS1311 - Data structures in pseudocode (or Scheme if you had the "X" class)
CS1312 - Build the game "Risk" in Java
CS2130 - Die a painful death at the hands of Jim Greenlee's compiler class.
I actually think the class needs a book or at least an extended article written about the end of the "shaft" era. I've never seen a professor brag about a student offering a bribe in order to pass.
It was interesting to see so many classmates panic in the class over how seemingly arbitrary the zeroes were given over minor mistakes. I, for example, was given a zero for a lab because I forgot to sign in. The grade for this lab was entirely based on signing in though because it was written incorrectly. The class just had tons of "life isn't fair, you should have paid attention" anecdotes.
We have a similar course too which focuses specifically on language design without the compiler part (they do get a bit of compiler theory) which satisfies that "requirement" for graduation. It is much more popular than the compiler course which is perceived as "harder" (it probably is when I teach it). ;)
IIRC (may be wrong, read as a kid), those ladies used to signal which aristocrats should be chopped vs. not, by signalling with their knitting needles, or a nod or shake of the head, or some such - while sitting in the front row before the guillotine.
Ghoulish. Of course, as a kid, you (I) lap up and relish that stuff, like breakfast cereal.
