Two years later, I interviewed at a large SV company, and they asked what projects I'd been working on. I gave a description of this project (2 years prior) and my explanation was phenomenal; in order to understand SVMs two years prior (without the 'necessary' mathematical background) I needed to develop all of the intuition (up to 'is kinda a high pass filter' etc) (which you might not ordinarily do at a time-pressured university course).

The interviewer was correspondingly impressed, and the SV company gave me an internship almost directly off the back of this interview.

The kicker is that at this point, I had a rudimentary knowledge of linear algebra, and absolutely no knowledge of any other machine learning; I had no business interning in their data science team.

My point being that even as a first pass, the bookwork questions don't work fantastically. FizzBuzz is no better, but a data science alternative would have weeded me out pretty quickly.