On my first day at a frankly pretty shit Australian university, we had mandatory Linux and Solaris training. I managed to skip it because the IT guy turned his screen to me and said "What's this?" and I replied "Dunno, looks like Fedora Core", but anyone who couldn't do that sat through several hours of training on SSHing into things and using bash, after which they were expected to turn in assignments that would compile in a remote Solaris environment.

This story doesn't have any real point, except maybe to say that knowing your way around a shell is up to the arbitrary whims of your university's administration and lecturers.