No one seems to understand this. There is a large number of people in a CS college program that don't belong there. They had no interest in anything CS before they got there and they only enrolled because someone told them there was a lot of money in it.

Turns out you still actually have to be good at whatever you do.

How many CS grads commited to open source projects regularly? Do they perform better in interviews?

Some do, not that many. I have interviewed some stellar candidates who were heavily involved in some project they were passionate about (my favourite was one that wrote an emulator for a 90s-era games VM I won't mention) - so there's definitely some relationship between people who code for passion and interest and people who are good at coding - which isn't exactly surprising.

In my experience, very few, but most of those were exceptional people. They contributed to something they were passionate about, and learned all the stuff you don't get in school (writing code that can be maintained for a while, and that's maintainable by others; use of source control and issue trackers, etc).

That said, I can think of two cases where I'm pretty sure they "contributed" because they were told or read that it would be good to do for their resume. One basically just uploaded a couple projects to github (with one commit). The other had contributed a few trivial patches to a couple projects, at least one had some comments that were unaddressed and didn't get merged.