I've seen a lot of cases where the professors thought exactly that. Unfortunately they were in denial because their teaching skills were abysmal.

I've seen courses where the students were memorising MATLAB scripts by rote for exams because almost none of them had sufficient understanding to have any chance of recreating it in the exam. Why? Because rather than teaching this stuff, the lecturer spent several lectures explaining the details of the representation of floating point number (this was a first-year class for math majors, not people doing CS).

But it was hard as student representatives for us to prove any of this, because we didn't have access to feedback responses.