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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

#91

Post by killaken2000 »

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?

I would prefer it be more explicit and say, "each digit can only be used once".

Different can be interpreted in multiple ways.

Reminds me of a physics test where the question is something like:

Susie is almost at her house and comes to a stop in 4 seconds. What was her acceleration.

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

#92

Post by mnbvkhgvmj »

avmich wrote: post #67
mnbvkhgvmj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"The exam was translated for the students in China and Russia."

I wonder if the translator fully understood the questions.

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

#93

Post by povertyworld »

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…

Isn't this just the sort of stuff students do in a first year discrete math class? This question is hardly scandalous.

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

#94

Post by mfoy_ »

jbob2000 wrote: post #65
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…

What about culture? Computer programming languages and paradigms have all been developed under western culture; they're written in english with logic that is derived from western philosophy. Without being fully absorbed in this culture, you will lack the key thing that makes you go "ah ha! I get it!"

Other than all the reserved words and major libraries being in English, what do you mean?

How does western philosophy or culture impact software design? I'd argue that how software works is influenced by how computers work, which is influence by how physics works, which is culture-agnostic. You can't possibly say "binary is so Western". So, what, exactly is influenced by the culture / philosophy?

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

#95

Post by xxpor »

commandlinefan wrote: post #57
BeetleB wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Once you get down to the average university, the number of foreigners in undergrad classes drops dramatically - it's just too expensive for most foreigners to pay out of state tuition unless it is a prestigious univ…

Maybe at the undergraduate level. My grad school experience was exactly the opposite. I was the _only_ U.S. citizen in most of my classes and one of maybe three in the entire CS program.

an MS in CS has limited value in the US, unless you need it for visa purposes.

As an example, in 2013 Amazon was only offering an additional $5k salary IIRC for new grads with an MS.

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

#96

Post by HarryHirsch »

kristopolous wrote: post #59
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…

Asking "how many 3 digit numbers are there where each digit of the number only appears once?" is nearly a mathematically identical problem but without the fake backstory. Being able to go from some constructed story to a math problem is a skill that can be tested elsewhere (and really, should be assumed if someone clearly has proficient enough numeracy to do combinatorics) Questions should be testing one thing as iso…

Transforming the backstory into math is the important skill that it's all about, and no, you can't assume that a student who knows how to manipulate numbers knows how to apply them.

I can see this in my students in my introductory class. You can ask them to calculate a concentration of a solution and they will reply just fine. But when you ask them to go into the lab and actually prepare a solution of a certain concentration you draw blanks in 9 cases out of 10. Students are trained in AP Chemistry to spot problems according to keywords and apply the appropiate formula, but they have never thought about the underlying meaning of the things they do, and they cannot connect different subjects to save their lives.

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

#97

Post by crazynick4 »

rwj wrote: post #9
crazynick4 wrote: post #7

It could be that my memory of hypothesis testing is outdated, but being 1 standard deviation away from the mean isn't evidence of a significant difference in skills.

Except that this isn't hypothesis testing. The graphs are not clearly labelled, but I'm interpreting the results as indicating that the entire population is shifted. This would be a significant advantage. (If it was hypothesis testing, 1 sigma could be statistically significant depending on sample size. You might be confusing the population variance with the sample mean variance.)

> You might be confusing the population variance with the sample mean variance.

That's exactly what I'm doing - thanks for pointing that out.

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

#98

Post by ggggtez »

povertyworld wrote: post #93
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…

Isn't this just the sort of stuff students do in a first year discrete math class? This question is hardly scandalous.

I agree. Looking at the same sample questions, these are not difficult questions if you know the relevant field of study.

The sample questions cover amortization, memory allocation, finite state machines, formal logic... If you just studied enough to pass a whiteboard interview, I'd hazard that you probably can't answer half of these questions without looking up what the symbols mean.

Sure, most people here may be able to figure out the PIN question, but it's not about whether any single question is easy or hard, but whether the test can sort the students according to ability. A good student may misread one or two, but a bad student is going to miss a lot more.

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

#99

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

martin_a wrote: post #66
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must come from a well off background to afford the luxury of morality when choosing jobs. While you might be happy Europe has no six figure SW jobs, I, not being able afford a decent house in a decent area to raise a family on your average Austrian SW dev salary, am not, and would gladly take a FAANG job any day regardless of how morally questionable it may seem from your McMansion. My family's well being comes f…

You haven't got the slightest idea of my background but rest assured it's rather the opposite of "well off", coming from a small village in the middle of literally nowhere in Germany. Maybe because of that we're holding values and standards like "do no evil" high, because there are more important things than money. I can't afford a house in a decent area either, but I'm pretty sure I won't fuck up lives with my job.…

How will working for FAANG fuck up people's lives?

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

#100

Post by criddell »

xxpor wrote: post #95
commandlinefan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe at the undergraduate level. My grad school experience was exactly the opposite. I was the _only_ U.S. citizen in most of my classes and one of maybe three in the entire CS program.

an MS in CS has limited value in the US, unless you need it for visa purposes. As an example, in 2013 Amazon was only offering an additional $5k salary IIRC for new grads with an MS.

Do people go to grad school for the money though?
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