Nothing stops them from doing that. We had that happen in the past, and just changed the requirements around a bit. However, immediately after completing the coding challenge, applicants are given a Technical Interview, and you can't really hide behind someone else's answer when you're asked to explain the code you wrote. We also have them create a new application during the technical interview, which we don't publish on the web. They pair with one of the interviewers on creating another toy application.
What we are looking for is not necessarily one given answer, instead, we look for how well someone can explain the answer they wrote. If they can take someone through their thought process for whatever decisions they made, they're likely going to be a good programmer.
Juggling various incoming skill levels is always a challenge. You can't perfectly line up every student, but you can plan for it in the curriculum. The admissions process helps us identify people who can already teach themselves programming.
Heads up: I run one of these schools in SF and Austin, MakerSquare.
>But if the stats that these bootcamps throw out are true, there are companies hiring people at $100k who, twelve weeks ago, had never opened a text editor in their lives.
This is a very extreme case. As part of the admissions process for most great schools, people who have never opened a text editor are shown tutorials, books, and videos to prepare for the admissions challenge. They wouldn’t be accepted until they can solve basic programming challenges. Example: (mks.io/ac1, mks.io/ac2)
There are some schools who admit “people who have never opened a text editor in their lives”. Flatiron School, MakerSquare, Hack Reactor and a few others are not those. IMHO, programs who admit very beginner students like those should be 6 mo - 1 year long.
> The run-of-the-mill web and mobile developer positions all demand at least some level of experience (generally 2-6 years)
Almost all of our graduates are hired for positions that advertised needing 2-4 years of experience.
> And if it's really possible to build a rails developer from scratch in 10 weeks, why not just just do it in-house through an internship program and avoid paying commission to these schools?
Properly vetting who would be a good student is hard (admissions), properly teaching people is hard, and creating a proper learning environment is also very hard (Most education institutions fail at one or more of the above). All of the above are certainly not core competencies of software companies, nor do they need to be.