I learned mips as graduate. In undergrad had to build with logic gates for things like 2 digit decimal counter and my architecture classes were diagram blocks for a simple CPU. But by that time we knew how to do moderate complexity circuits in VHDL simulation, and we had to make a simple VHDL circuit run for real in FPGA.
I had to learn assembly but was one topic of many we handled in architecture. Like one question of one exam. That was one of the toughest professors we had, class was about 2001