Ugh yeah that sentence made me cringe. It doesn&#x27;t do the intro courses justice at all. As someone who has both taken and graded those courses, I&#x27;ll try to clarify.<p>The intro courses don&#x27;t consist of homework like &quot;write a function which does X&quot;, and they aren&#x27;t graded like &quot;your function produced the correct output&quot;.<p>Instead, the homework consists of week- to two-week-long projects in which the student produces a moderately complex piece of code. Depending on the point in the semester, this could be anything from a collection of pure mutually-recursive functions, a self-contained class with a nice api boundary, a collection of classes to draw some graphics format, or something else entirely.<p>The homework is always done in pairs, and you&#x27;re not allowed to work on it unless your partner is present for pair programming. During official lab timeslots, students are told to trade off &quot;driving&quot; (using the keyboard) every 15 minutes to half hour.<p>Finally, the assignments are graded both on whether they produce the correct output and the clarity and efficiency of the code.<p>Student pairs are switched up multiple times throughout the semester, and the graders&#x2F;tutors (&quot;grutors&quot;) spend significant amounts of time working with each pair and making sure that <i>both</i> members understand what&#x27;s going on.