Do high academic achievers know any proper industry coding skills??

So I work at a startup based in the US and I've been interviewing some candidates from NUS and NTU.

They all seem very very qualified on paper. Double major CS and Math at NTU/NUS, distinction this, first class honours that, 4.0 GPA etc.

They seem to have taken all sorts of courses in CS from Algorithms/Data structures, AI/ML, etc.

You would expect they would know BARE minimum coding.

but no

I made the interview as easy as possible. CS guys would understand this.

I simply asked them to reverse a string in Python. "dog" -> "god"
I also asked them to split a string by a character "one, two, three" -> "one", "two", "three"

They were just staring at their screen for 5 minutes straight. With a little nudge, they write some really bad code that doesn't make any sense??? if count ==0: then if count !=0 right under the same loop?

They all are super qualified on paper and SG Exams, but they can't do the most basic of coding skills.
How can any company trust them with much larger and complex codebases??

Is all of school a scam, what are they even learning in school?
How are they passing literally ANY CS course if they can't do the most basic of coding skills??

Note, this happened several times to the point i felt the need to make a post lol.

Not everyone, some were really good I might add.

Those with ACTUAL WORK EXPERIENCE combined with NUS/NTU or from lesser known colleges/no college did really well. But those with just academia certifications didn't know ANYTHING.

For those worrying about exams or whatnot, as a recruiter I can tell you, especially in Computer Science/IT field and in the West, we do not care. We've seen too many examples of math exam nerds not being able to do the most basic of tasks.

Just get work experience, that is valued WAY more, and actually know the skills relevant.

NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK
like dating, you can't spam approach and compete against other 1000s of applicants and get a response, you need to casually network with a layer of plausible deniablity (talking about smth else in focus then gradually know them) then show off your skills and get a job.

Just leave singapore and find a job elsewhere if you hate this academia focused grind!

Sorry for the rant, would love to hear y'all's thoughts on the education here. Happy Wednesday!