Our final CS course, Operating Systems, was in C, after all the previous courses were in Pascal. Luckily, I had already gotten access to various Unix systems and had taught myself C (thanks, K&R !!). And I say luckily because it was expecially lucky for my SWE group members who would otherwise have not graduated. I was already 10x at that point because of early access and passion for the craft. Most if not all of them had already decided that programming was not their career path, so it was in everyone's benefit and happiness.

Funny enough, there was no version control at our uni (a pretty good one, but not primarily technical), and that OS we tweaked for the course was the current version of Tanenbaum's Minix that Linus transformed into Linux. 20 minutes for a recompile and test loop to fix that stupid mistake in the semaphore logic was painful, but that's life on a 286.

It took real passion to want to bang through that learning curve. It really weeded out the folks who were just looking for an engineering job, at least for the handful (4) of people I knew in the program.