Indeed. I go to Northwestern University, but I know for a fact that our first lab in Intro to Computer Systems is the same as the one at Carnegie Mellon. Basically, you're given a C file and you have to implement about 20 instructions using only specific bitwise operations and only a certain number of them. The fun part is that the number of instructions you used is posted on a website, along with the "professor's" result so you can compete against other people in the class to do it in the quickest possible fashion, but also against the professor's score.

Basically, if you can't figure these out for yourself, I'm not sure you're a very good programmer.