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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

#131

Post by bfrydl »

ajross wrote: post #113
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…

> 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 yo…

This is a Computer Science test, not a Software Engineering test. I think it's even worse as a test for the latter.

I don't really agree that these questions test debugging skill. In real life if I read a bit of confusing code and get tricked, I will usually know immediately thanks to my IDE, compiler, automated tests, debugger, or behavior of the program. On this test if I get tricked, I just lose points.

In my experience most debugging presents as trial-and-error (a terrible test-taking strategy) or seeing a bug and reasoning at a high level which component of the software is responsible and gradually narrowing it down. Carefully reading through lines of code is usually the last step, unless I've got an especially elusive bug.

> 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'm not sure what sorts of code you're reading but this opinion seems extreme. Do you really just wholly ignore comments and variable names? I have encountered inaccurate examples of both but I have never thought to distrust them by default. As far as I recall this has not caused me serious issues while debugging.

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

#132

Post by jhall1468 »

saberience wrote: post #119
jhall1468 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The fact that you would even state such a fallacious comment makes me question YOUR educational background.

I'd advise you avoid resorting to personal attacks when you disagree with a non-personal statement, as it really does lead to people ignoring your the premise of your point. Personal attacks when calling out fallacious arguments are particularly off-putting.

That said, you failed to understand the premise because you took one sentence out of context. The point I was making was that Cambridge and Oxford both have top CS programs which can result in jobs outside the UK and EU. Major tech companies routinely nab graduates from those two universities on work visa's in the US.

The importing of UK CS graduates plummets beyond top-tier universities, while China, Russia and India all see massive work visa imports into the US. The UK, outside of Cambridge and Oxford, simply doesn't export a lot of CS graduates, indicating an educational gap (or at the very least, an "interview gap") between those countries and countries with massive work visa exports.

> 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.

Your anecdata isn't interesting or useful.

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

#133

Post by bfrydl »

zrobotics wrote: post #122
ggggtez wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Which is a limitation from the mechanics of the mechanism used. Including such a restriction on an electronic PIN is stupid, but I've seen enough idiotic password policies that I don't doubt someone has done it. For example, my bank (at least 2 months ago, haven't tested recently) makes no distinction between case of letters, so 'aaa' = 'aAa' = 'AAA'.

It's considerably worse when you see bizarre password restrictions because they usually mean the password is stored in plaintext. For example, your bank definitely is doing that.

Don't use that same password for anything else!

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

#134

Post by DeonPenny »

criddell wrote: post #100
xxpor wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No but most jobs offer the same benefit when it comes to research. You'd get paid more and do more cutting edge ML and data science working for FB or Google than MIT

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

#135

Post by mywittyname »

mattkrause wrote: post #41
gyc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The purpose of ABET accreditation is to ensure that students are prepared to take the fundamentals of engineering exam. Hardly any CS grads take the exam because it doesn't help you get a job. So it's not a big deal that their CS departments aren't accredited.

However, every school you listed is ABET accredited in other engineering disciplines (mechanical, chemical, civil, electrical). So ABET-accreditation is important to some fields.

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

#136

Post by mattkrause »

mywittyname wrote: post #135
mattkrause wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The purpose of ABET accreditation is to ensure that students are prepared to take the fundamentals of engineering exam. Hardly any CS grads take the exam because it doesn't help you get a job. So it's not a big deal that their CS departments aren't accredited. However, every school you listed is ABET accredited in other engineering disciplines (mechanical, chemical, civil, electrical). So ABET-accreditation is import…

It's not a huge deal, but it's not entirely trivial either.

I don't want to be too elitist, but where would you like to recruit reviewers for your computer-related patents from: DeVry Tech or Stanford? Do you really want to actively exclude Princeton and Yale grads from working on software that runs the government?

I get the appeal of having a standardized 'seal of approval', but for Computer Science, ABET is clearly not that. It looks like several other disciplines are also moving away from ABET (e.g., https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i48/time-leave-behind-chemic...)

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

#137

Post by rightbyte »

ggggtez wrote: post #98
povertyworld wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

There is a general description of some nomenclature and symbols in the appendix which I assume the student get.

What this really measures is corricilum. And pressumbly it's more stuff like this in the US then Russia?

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

#138

Post by bfrydl »

sbov wrote: post #56
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…

The funny thing is the question is actively harmful to real world problem solving. If I had to write a feature where passwords could not repeat any character the spec would spend a lot more than 1 word explaining that (and why there is that weird restriction in the first place). Assuming they wanted such a system based upon a single word would be a bizarre conclusion to jump to.

Yeah if this were a Software Engineering test the correct answer to the question would be: ”First I would ask the client why they needed this. If they didn't have a good answer I would advise them not to do it. If they still want it anyway: 720.”

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

#139

Post by charlesbradshaw »

ggggtez wrote: post #128
charlesbradshaw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You only seem interested in discussing gender to bring up the ghost of genetic predispositions. But if you want to twist the study in that way, you'll have to first say that you think that whites are genetically superior to non-white in the world of computer science. After all, doesn't the study show the gap is even greater for nationality? Just come out and say it, instead of having this proxy argument over gender.…

You're making very strong claims against me, but I think we're on the same side. The paper disappoints me because they attempt to think of all the explanatory variables for the differences between countries, then they turn to gender and end on a chart. It's impossible to read the paper and come away with the impression that whites are simply better at coding, because the authors give so much context to their findings.

I am agnostic to the cause of the gender difference, and clearly this study didn't have enough information to give any insights. That's why I find it so unsatisfying that they would put up a chart and mention gender differences if they weren't interested or capable of expanding on the results beyond "[...] more effort is needed to attract higher-achieving female students into CS."

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