I recently finished out a stint at General Assembly's Web Development course in Atlanta. I'm definitely not an average example of my cohort, though I would like to say that prior experience I brought in really drove up the "average" for many of my peers.

Of a class size of 17 people, many of us had jobs lined up before we finished while several were / are still taking time to "get ready"; There was only one who sort of remained clueless during the cohort, but in spite of that they have worked very hard to keep up in class.

The coding required to get into GA was minimal, and the interview beforehand was not very difficult-- the person I mentioned who was generally clueless actually blew through the admissions process (better than I did, in fact).

I'm not sure where it's appropriate to set that barrier to entry, especially given that most of the early material caters to someone with very limited knowledge-- it would have been interesting to see a course targeted at someone who already has a foundation in basic web technologies.

Living in Atlanta, I've had the opportunity to speak with grads of many other bootcamps both in Atlanta and on the West coast. The biggest difference I really notice is between people who were able/willing to work those 60/70 hour weeks to gain as much as possible and those who couldn't/wouldn't.

I was definitely in the top x% for some values of x. :)

Kidding aside, I definitely wasn't the best or the worst in my class. The variance from best to worst was pretty large, but that's obviously going to be true for traditional CS degrees or anything else in life as well.