I was the only one who knew which end of a soldering iron to pick up though. Not that that really helped until the 3rd year project which was worth about 5% of a degree.
Kevin
The poor quality of the modern grads is very dissapointing....theory is reasonable but engineering is real world....I am no longer shocked by the lack of basic skills and knowldege any more....
Personnel do initial paper shift, and try to put in as many grads as possible for our interviews. Then when we get the CVs we tend to discard most of the grads, as past experience has shown they are all brains, no common sense. They are fine at pure theory, but lost real world.
MCSE's, when I used to be a manager of a Windows team, are also a bloody joke. My mum could get an MCSE, but I wouldn't let her loose on a server....
At interviews, I'm normally left to do the technical evaluations, an I have a set number of hugely simple questions (things like what 2 DNS records are required for a domain to receive smtp mail), and its shocking that the huge majority of 'experts' do not have the faintest idea....