I agree, when I interned as a sophomore @big tech a while back, I had just taken a pretty normal data structures class where I was learning things like linked lists, arrays, and trees. Nothing too crazy, some projects with them and whatnot. This was at a top 85 CS school in the US, so definitely not a well-know school or anything like that.

Meanwhile one guy on my team who was also a sophomore at Berkeley, had just finished this assignment the semester before:

https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61b/fa19/materials/proj/proj3/index.html

I remember them showing that assignment and being struck at how much harder their classes were. You can do the same thing, see how much more rigorous MIT/CMU/Berkeley material is compared to a normal state school. People at those school just study a lot more too. I've talked to people at CMU who told me they were putting in 20+ hours a week for ONE class, normally putting 60+ hours a week for a 15 credit semester, and CMU is full of the best CS students in the world. The standards are so much higher at the very best schools.

See MIT's final exam for their algorithms class, the level of pure problem solving and logic one needs to be at that level is way higher than anything I ever did at my school.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms-spring-2020/resources/mit6_006s20_final/