A course at university made us program a chat server and client with Java RPC (in the days where there was no such thing as stack overflow), without ever teaching us anything about coding.

The grading was based on unit tests executed on a Server the university provided.
The server was down or overloaded most of the time and one could only try to deploy at most 3 times...
There were heuristics in place to find duplicate solutions.

... I have to say, that course took me from "hello world" to developer within a couple of months. Thanks assholes!! :D