The report is based on a sample of 36,800 from more than 500 colleges across India.

Aspiring Minds said it used the automated tool Automata which is a 60-minute test taken in a compiler integrated environment and rates candidates on programming ability, programming practices, run-time complexity and test case coverage.

It uses advanced artificial intelligence technology to automatically grade programming skills.

"We find that out of the two problems given per candidate, only 14% engineers are able to write compilable codes for both and only 22% write compilable code for exactly one problem," the study said.

It further found that of the test subjects only 14.67% were employable by an IT services company.

When it came to writing fully functional code using the best practices for efficiency and writing, only 2.21% of the engineers studied made the grade.

"Functionally correct code is the basic requisite of a good programmer. However, to enhance the quality of the code, a few more important indicators have emerged - efficiency, time complexity and space complexity," the study said.

"Nothing is more time-consuming than dealing with badly written code which leads to enormous bugs and exceptions. The analysis unveils that only 2.21% engineers possess the skillset to write logically correct code with best efficiency and least time-space complexity."

The subjects of the study were 61.1% male and 38.9% female. They came from the cities of Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Kolkata.

Automata can predict job suitability of a candidate by evaluating his/her coding ability on the following parameters:

• Programming ability – evaluates the implementation of the right algorithm using the control-structures, data dependencies and relevance of the solution.
• Programming practices – evaluates the code for the best practices implemented across industry while developing code which enhances its readability and usability.
• Runtime complexity – evaluates the runtime complexity by comparing to the runtime complexity of optimised code.
• Functional correctness – measures the degree of code correctness based on the test-suit coverage by the developed code. The type of test cases evaluated are: basic, advanced and edge.
• Final score – calculates overall score by weighing the candidate’s performance in each of the four metrics.