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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

#111

Post by ggggtez »

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?

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).

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

#112

Post by hinkley »

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…

It's both. A social norm sustains itself because if most of the people I want to be like are doing it (correlation), then I will do it (causation) too, unless I've put a lot of extra thought in and made a conscious decision to do something else.

The social animal's default mode is to follow the herd. "The herd" could have even started out as the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy (random correlation), but now people are motivated to join in. To assemble. To copy.

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

#113

Post by ajross »

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…

> Doesn't seem like a great test to me unless it's about your reading comprehension and ability to decipher code with single-letter variable names.

Really? I mean, to first approximation, all software engineering work is debugging. And to first approximation, all debugging is about carefully reading results and the code that generated them. That sounds pretty spot-on to my eyes.

And the variable naming quip... are you serious? One of the worst mistakes you can make when trying to read code for understanding is to rely on documentation layers like comments and variable names. Those things lie. Read the code.

I mean, obviously people do rely on those things for understanding, so when writing code it's important to have good semantically and contextually clear names for stuff (which certainly can include single letter names for local symbols repeated often!). But for debugging, you really have to train yourself to read the code, not the names.

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

#114

Post by zazen »

ggggtez wrote: post #104
mnbvkhgvmj wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the translator fully understood the questions.

There is no reason to doubt the translator just because you don't like the study's result.

No, but there might be reason to doubt the translation on the basis that the intersection of the skillsets "fluent in Russian" and "total command of the relevant computer science material" might not have many people.

For a fair comparison, the translator would have to fully appreciate the relevant connotation of every significant word like "different" in every question, and successfully convey the same in Russian. You couldn't just go to a regular translation service and get a good result.

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

#115

Post by eam »

mywrathacademia wrote: post #101
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…

Thinking of the problem as a nested for loop it's intuitive to see how you get 1000 combinations without the numbers being unique but I dont see how to get 720 combinations as the answer when each digit is different. Can you explain where 720 combinations comes from in the context I mentioned?

Permutation without repetition.

The formula is:

n! / (n − r)!

Since there is 10 (n=10) total numbers, 0-9. And it can only be 3 (r=3) digits long. Then it would be,

10! / (10-3)!* which would result in,

10 * 9 * 8 * 7 * 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 / (7 * 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1) = 10 * 9 * 8 = 720.

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

mywrathacademia wrote: post #101
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…

Thinking of the problem as a nested for loop it's intuitive to see how you get 1000 combinations without the numbers being unique but I dont see how to get 720 combinations as the answer when each digit is different. Can you explain where 720 combinations comes from in the context I mentioned?

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by ggggtez »

mywrathacademia wrote: post #101
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…

Thinking of the problem as a nested for loop it's intuitive to see how you get 1000 combinations without the numbers being unique but I dont see how to get 720 combinations as the answer when each digit is different. Can you explain where 720 combinations comes from in the context I mentioned?

I'd like to highlight this comment for everyone who is saying the question can only be gotten wrong by someone who misreads it.

It can be easy for people to forget that many people (even coders) have never done this type of math before.

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

#118

Post by ggggtez »

charlesbradshaw wrote: post #81

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 are coming to the conversation with a narrative already in mind and are not looking at the data.

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

#119

Post by saberience »

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…

"That certainly indicates that your educational programs for CS are lacking if you didn't go to a school named Oxford or Cambridge."

lol, you can't judge educational programs by the rate of unemployment! You realize how little sense that makes? The fact that you would even state such a fallacious comment makes me question YOUR educational background. A countries unemployment rate is massively dependent on the economy of the country. You don't say, look at the lack of top tech companies in Russia, it must mean their students are idiots! It has all to do with their governmental policy-making and the sanctions on the country, as well as various historical factors.

The UK has been under government "austerity measures" since the 2008/2009 crash which have massively reduced growth across sectors. The UK actually has a great education system but this doesn't matter if the economy is doing badly and jobs aren't being created.

In fact (I live in California) from all I've seen of the US CS market, US grads are by far the worst in terms of all the nationalities I work with. The fact that the US tech industry is booming has far more to do with the VC world, the booming economy, and the huge amount of people from around the world moving to California, than it has to do with US schools being good at CS. All the top data scientists at my current company are from China!

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

#120

Post by zrobotics »

ggggtez wrote: post #104
mnbvkhgvmj wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the translator fully understood the questions.

There is no reason to doubt the translator just because you don't like the study's result.

Doubting that the translation caused some discrepancy isn't unreasonable. Technical and academic works are notoriously difficult to translate, and it's entirely possible that even though "different" was stressed, certain languages lost the distinction, whereas if the word had been "unique" the distinction would have remained.

Although I have no faith in a multiple choice test as a predictor of CS knowledge anyway. That is just a horrible test format anyway.

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