  An engineer in a product company is expected to design a good solution to a
computing problem (Design skill) and articulate the solution well (Expression
skill). We expect an industry-ready student (final year student or a fresh
campus hire) as well to demonstrate both these skills when working on simple
problems assigned to them.
  This paper reports on the results when we tested a cohort of participants
(N=16) for these two skills. We created two participant groups from two
different tiers of college, one from a Tier 1 college (who were taking an
advanced elective course), and another from Tier 2 colleges (who had been hired
for internship in a SaaS product company). We gave them a simple design problem
and evaluated the quality of their design and expression. Design quality was
evaluated along three design principles of Abstraction, Decomposition, and
Precision (adapted from the Software Engineering Book of Knowledge). Expression
quality was evaluated using criteria we developed for our study that is based
on the diversity and density of the expressions used in the articulation.
  We found the students lacking in design and expression skills. Specifically,
a) they struggled with abstraction as a design principle, b) they did not use
enough modes of expressions to articulate their design, and c) they did not use
enough formal notations (UML, equations, relations, etc.). We also found
significant difference in the performance between the two participant groups.
