I can't speak for jvns, but for my degree, "UNIX BASICS" was essentially "Command-line basics" (an intro class), and Assembly was pretty much just the actual language syntax, registers, pointers, and interrupts. The word "syscall" might have been mentioned once or twice, but only in a hand-wavy, "don't worry about this right now" kind of way.
mainly just, "how to deference the address you just got to get the value you want." Might be covered under the "syntax" heading as well, but the concept was still gone over for those that hadn't quite grokked it yet.
