This sounds like a madeup story, but you wish it was

None of the students he had talked to knew where the labs were which should have been his first clue. He didn't give it much thought, maybe they were new maybe they were the slackers who always skipped classes, or maybe they were in a different stream that didn't involve going to the labs. Perhaps the college provided students with laptops that they could plug into the screens during the class, that would be a smart move, save on the repair costs and offload it to the students, who could just be using virtual machine images to run their class-related projects. That's what it probably was, that had to be it, there was no other way a college that claimed so prominently to teach computer programming would go without a computer lab.

In two hours he realized his guess was wrong and his deepest greatest fears had come true. There was no lab, there were no monitors, the students weren't even graded for writing working code. Instead programming was taught to them like every other subject, they were supposed to write it with pen and paper, and they were evaluated and graded by the graders. It wasn't just short, simple easy-to-understand programs either, the students were writing pages and pages of modules and functions, fully commented in a different ink, which the graders spent hours and hours running through manually.

His first order of business was to go to the administration and complain about the situation. Running on pen and paper was not how students should be taught programming, he said, pleading them to provide a computer lab. There was no way the graders could accurately run all the scenarios and identify the bugs. To which the administration replied that the students needed an inside-out understanding of code, just like they knew chemical equations by heart before they would be able to handle the reactions themselves. He explained to them that making the graders run the programs was actually more similar to have them predict the interactions between chemicals and 'simulate' the reaction in their heads. No the Principle replied, this is how things have always been done, and look at how well our students have done in the board exams, we don't have the money and there is no more room for improvements in the board exams so there is no value added to the school or the students. He argued that the value added to the students was that they'd actually be able to write code that would run on computers, to be able to be effective engineers in real companies who'd want to hire their students. His pleas went unheard.