121–130 of 176 posts
Here's a question from the other side - what are good courses for people from these countries to study so that they become more skilled ? Im assuming that most of the Coursera/udacity/etc combo is ineffective, because the students from other countries must already be consuming them. So the difference is clearly originating from college level courses. Should everyone just do Abelson and Sussman + Knuth and call it a d…
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Funny. Yeah I totally would have missed the word "different"... does such a lock even exist in the real world?
Yes, such locks exist, and are actually sold in the real world. They are often used in "outdoor key storage", which will find you images of what they look like. Though I can't guarantee any particular model has this particular PIN flaw (some are even worse, such as only allowing a single number from each row).
It feels like we're at a point where people have to be sorry if they find a difference between genders. This article put the gender graph at the end and moved on without discussion, as compared to every other graph, so I looked at the paper[1] and they do the same thing. Is this study so flawed that the results are meaningless and shouldn't be discussed, or are the results meaningful and the authors will get backlash…
I guess people will be blind to information that disagrees with them. They DO discuss it, it's right there at the end: >In every country, the men came out ahead; the gap overall was smallest in China, and biggest in the U.S. But if you are looking at a difference of between gender (0.4) and thinking you'd rather hear them talk about that than the difference between nationality ( double that at 0.8) then you clearly a…
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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…
That's because their CS programs graduate a lot of people that can't program.
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> 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 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…
It feels like we're at a point where people have to be sorry if they find a difference between genders. This article put the gender graph at the end and moved on without discussion, as compared to every other graph, so I looked at the paper[1] and they do the same thing. Is this study so flawed that the results are meaningless and shouldn't be discussed, or are the results meaningful and the authors will get backlash…
I guess people will be blind to information that disagrees with them. They DO discuss it, it's right there at the end: >In every country, the men came out ahead; the gap overall was smallest in China, and biggest in the U.S. But if you are looking at a difference of between gender (0.4) and thinking you'd rather hear them talk about that than the difference between nationality ( double that at 0.8) then you clearly a…
(From the article)
> CS departments and CS education in general have a longer history and are much more established in the United States than in China or India especially.
> A lot more is spent per student in the U.S. than in the other three countries.
(From the paper)
> United States have likely similar math and science levels as students in Russia (Implying the difference in CS scores comes from somewhere else)
But the line you quoted was the only "discussion" on the differences in gender in the article. I think there has to be at least something to discuss.Why is the gender gap smallest in China? Why is there a gap at all for people sitting in the same classes? Are there any other metrics (like age?) that had similar differences? Did the size of the gap change when looking at elite institutions?
To be completely fair, there was some discussion in the last paragraph in the paper, but the only hint at what might be causing the difference was that the women in CS aren't high achieving enough. I wouldn't count that as in depth discussion on the cause.
> The gender gap in skills does indicate that more effort is needed to attract higher-achieving female students into CS [...]
Just putting a chart at stating results the end of a paper and an article isn't a discussion. There is a gap between genders about half as large as the gap between countries. Having questions about that doesn't imply a narrative.
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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 conce…
The mechanical kinesthetics of combining things is not the same skillset as the mathematical process of computing it. Lab work is its own craft.
Based on what you're saying, I'm assuming you already put your questions in the "Story time" format and are getting that 1/10 success rate because the story problems are yet a Third skill - this time one about reading comprehension and language mastery.
Reading comprehension isn't kinesthetics and that's not computation. One may partially inform the other, but each skill is fairly independent.
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I guess people will be blind to information that disagrees with them. They DO discuss it, it's right there at the end: >In every country, the men came out ahead; the gap overall was smallest in China, and biggest in the U.S. But if you are looking at a difference of between gender (0.4) and thinking you'd rather hear them talk about that than the difference between nationality ( double that at 0.8) then you clearly a…
The line you quoted isn't discussion, it is stating results. In the article and the paper there is discussion about the differences in education between countries. For example... (From the article) > CS departments and CS education in general have a longer history and are much more established in the United States than in China or India especially. > A lot more is spent per student in the U.S. than in the other three…
Just come out and say it, instead of having this proxy argument over gender.
If it isn't clear: this study can not be used to draw conclusions about racial or gender predispositions. This can only be used to show the status of education on this particular test and for people graduating right now. It doesn't control for how those people got there. If you want to twist it in some other way, that's your prerogative, but you're doing shoddy science.
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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.
If a CS student taking this test does not get “tricked” by this question, they should definitely be able to answer it.
It would have far more interesting to see the US stacked up to other English speaking countries. Wonder why they didn’t do that and had the exam translated instead..