Clearly there are uses for catching an exception of a particular type or of any type, doing some processing and then re-throwing the exception. However, that was not the case here. She just re-threw it. I recognize that it is technically harmless but this individual was supposedly weeks away from graduating with a CS degree - at that point you should understand exceptions, scope and all sorts of fundamentals that this kind of coding shows she does not.

An inexperienced developer I use to work with kept telling me that she, "..wanted to add exception handling.." to her code. For various reasons, I wasn't quite sure what she meant by that and for other reasons, I didn't bother asking... A couple weeks later, I did a diff on one of her check-ins to find that she had gone into a particular class (C#) and added try/catch blocks to every function in the class that looked like this:

public void FunctionName()
{
try
{
// code that was previously contained in the function...
}
catch (Exception e)
{
throw e
}
}