I graduated 20+ years ago from a top CS school, and this was the norm then as well, whether you wanted a job at a big company like Microsoft, a consulting company, or a hot tech startup.
The good news for me was that even though I had terrible grades, I knew how to code a Knight’s Tour or 8 Queens, work through some algorithm that appears to be N^2 but has a clever N solution, or if someone asked me about manholes, I could say “that’s a stupid question, here’s the default answer, and here’s why I think it’s a stupid question.”
I think I got 9 job offers from 10 interviews with a <3.0 GPA (before the dotcom crash).
In short, studying for the test helped with the SAT’s and it helped get my first job. When I applied to a FANG years later, there was not leetcode, just different design questions or basic things like making sure I could reverse a linked list or implement substr without an off by one error.
