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In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills

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Re: In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills

#41

Post by mattkrause »

gyc wrote: post #26
daveFNbuck wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also huge variation within countries. The curriculum is basically up to each college or university in the US. I never took this test.

I would assume ABET certified programs would have certain standards or requirements regarding he schools’ curriculums.

I’m not sure how much value I would ascribe to a certification that is held by DeVry University, but not the computer science departments of Stanford, Yale, or Princeton.

This annoys me to no end, since ABET is used to gate certain federal jobs and the Patent Bar, even in Computer Science.

Re: In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills

#42

Post by googlemike »

martin_a wrote: post #19
sidlls wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On average the best paying and most technically interesting ones are.

> most technically interesting Like making six figures a year for screwing people over at Facebook? Sorry for being snarky, but lots of jobs in IT businesses in the US tend to be somewhat unhelpful for the society at all and not really providing any benefit in the long term. In regard of this I'm always somewhat "happy" that we fail in Europe with building "the next Google", "the next Facebook" or whatever.

Europe has absolutely no innovation culture and tons of problems retaining founders. Anecdotally, I've found the bar for European engineers in Europe compared to American engineers an order of magnitude lower.

Re: In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills

#43

Post by jhall1468 »

martin_a wrote: post #19
sidlls wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On average the best paying and most technically interesting ones are.

> most technically interesting Like making six figures a year for screwing people over at Facebook? Sorry for being snarky, but lots of jobs in IT businesses in the US tend to be somewhat unhelpful for the society at all and not really providing any benefit in the long term. In regard of this I'm always somewhat "happy" that we fail in Europe with building "the next Google", "the next Facebook" or whatever.

You do realize that the top paying employers in the EU aren't "the next Google" or "the next Facebook" they are actual Google and actual Facebook. In fact, the top tech employers in the EU by average annual compensation is literally a list of US tech companies and SAP.

So you're correct, the EU has failed in building the next Google and Facebook, because the majority of top-tier EU CS grads already work for them.

Re: In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills

#44

Post by newman8r »

bfrydl wrote: post #36
harias wrote: post #17

> Once the students were selected, the researchers then administered the Major Field Test in Computer Science, an exam that was developed by the U.S. Educational Testing Service and is regularly updated. There is a huge variation among countries in how subjects are taught and tested. I would like to add that many of my peers have resorted to streamlining for whiteboard interviews, and unsurprisingly, they end up with…

I took a look at the sample questions for the test, having never heard of it. It's 66 multiple choice questions, and many of them seem like “gotcha” questions where one of the answers is an off-by-one error or something like that. And how about this lovely question: > A personal identification number that opens a certain lock consists of a sequence of 3 DIFFERENT digits from 0 though 9, inclusive. How many possible P…

Funny. Yeah I totally would have missed the word "different"... does such a lock even exist in the real world?

Re: In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills

#45

Post by [deleted] »

orting wrote: post #20
hopler wrote: post #15

I wonder how well US students would ranked on a test written by Russian, Indian, of Chinese testing company instead of a USA testing company.

This is a good point. From the article "Once the students were selected, the researchers then administered the Major Field Test in Computer Science, an exam that was developed by the U.S. Educational Testing Service and is regularly updated. The exam was translated for the students in China and Russia." It seems reasonable to expect a test written for a specific education system (either implicitly or explicitly) will…

[deleted]

Re: In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills

#46

Post by t_fatus »

jhall1468 wrote: post #32
t_fatus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

meanwhile European CS students, with their fellow students from the UK, Switzerland, Korea, Japan, [add whatever country you like except the 3 which are - on average - worst than the US in CS) are busy getting even more better than the average CS US student

Going to need a citation on that. The US presently dominates the tech sector. Rankings of programs are generally to be taken with a grain of salt, but MIT, Stanford, UCB and Carnegie Mellon all rank the top 4 on almost any list you'll find. Meanwhile, in the UK CS grads have the highest unemployment among any field, and have maintained that "award" for nearly a decade. That certainly indicates that your educational p…

The point was to illustrate the fact that 'world domination' is a strange word to use when comparing against 3 countries only, leaving aside a lot of well educated students, some of who ranked as the best of their field - for instance korean and french students in ML.

Plus the fact that the US dominates the tech sector has more to do with the available capital there than the technical skills of US students (on average)

Re: In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills

#47

Post by [deleted] »

newman8r wrote: post #44
bfrydl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a look at the sample questions for the test, having never heard of it. It's 66 multiple choice questions, and many of them seem like “gotcha” questions where one of the answers is an off-by-one error or something like that. And how about this lovely question: > A personal identification number that opens a certain lock consists of a sequence of 3 DIFFERENT digits from 0 though 9, inclusive. How many possible P…

Funny. Yeah I totally would have missed the word "different"... does such a lock even exist in the real world?

[deleted]

Re: In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills

#49

Post by yorwba »

ummonk wrote: post #24

> making sure that both the educational institutions and students enrolled at those schools were statistically representative of schools and computer science students throughout the respective nations. Given the typical CS student body, this basically means Indian, Chinese, and Russian students studying at US universities performed better than those studying at Indian, Chinese, and Russian universities... Either beca…

The study (which I didn't see linked in the article, so here it is: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116 ) also tried to investigate this question by restricting their analysis to students at US universities whose strongest language is English (89.1% of their sample) or those who claim two strongest languages and didn't find a significant difference to the overall US student population.

That doesn't say a lot about Indian/Chinese/Russian students in the US in particular, but their data is public at https://osf.io/c78wb/ , so maybe it's possible to get that information, depending on how strongly they anonymized it.

Re: In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills

#50

Post by mnbvkhgvmj »

bfrydl wrote: post #36
harias wrote: post #17

> Once the students were selected, the researchers then administered the Major Field Test in Computer Science, an exam that was developed by the U.S. Educational Testing Service and is regularly updated. There is a huge variation among countries in how subjects are taught and tested. I would like to add that many of my peers have resorted to streamlining for whiteboard interviews, and unsurprisingly, they end up with…

I took a look at the sample questions for the test, having never heard of it. It's 66 multiple choice questions, and many of them seem like “gotcha” questions where one of the answers is an off-by-one error or something like that. And how about this lovely question: > A personal identification number that opens a certain lock consists of a sequence of 3 DIFFERENT digits from 0 though 9, inclusive. How many possible P…

That question first and foremost tests English reading abilities. Many mathematically gifted non-native speakers (and indeed native speakers) would miss-understand the "different".
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