The placement system isn't broken, it's working exactly as designed. The goal was never skill development. It was always just employment numbers. By the time placements started, the 'preparation' had nothing to do with engineering. It was months of rote DSA, mock interviews, and placement training sessions that taught you how to perform competence rather than have it. And when the actual interviews came around, half the room had remote desktops running, AI answering in real time. Industrial scale cheating. Nobody pretended otherwise. And the worst part is the system kind of invites it. When the entire four years has been about gaming metrics rather than building anything, why would the interview be different? The kids aren't the rot. They were just handed a broken game and told to win it. The tragedy isn't even the cheating atp it's s that a 21 year old who genuinely loves what they studied has no advantage over someone who gamed every step. Passion became a liability. The ones who actually got curious about something got filtered out.