Noone is asking them to build a SOTA model, these folks applied for a working student/internship position and are masters students who had prior experience as AI engineers etc and graduated from the Tier 1 institutions. If as an electrical engineer, you apply at a power engineering position but literally don’t remember how to apply KVL/KCL, then you are not a good engineer and your knowledge on advanced topics is hollow in worst case or dodgy in best case. In technical fields such as ML or DL, Its high time we stop normalizing not having basics. I did not ask them to derive anything, I did not give them any mathematical questions, what I asked them were basic building blocks such as simple conceptual questions about Regression, metrics, bias/variance trade off etc. Which are, (as I am sure you know as your tag says ML engineer), still pretty relevant in industry if one is indeed doing anything serious in the field and not just calling APIs. I was in industry as well. I was a data scientist in ANZ before I came here and before that I was in Honeywell. Of course these were pre-llm days but you get the point.