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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

#141

Post by cdf2theworld »

ggggtez wrote: post #117
mywrathacademia wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe CS degrees require discreet math (and highschool algebra 2), which means they've done permutations and combinatorics, so yes they've done these types of problems before. The real question is how long has it been?

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

#142

Post by yorwba »

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…

The data is available (although anonymized), so you can just run your own analysis.

Here's the mean z-score (and its standard deviation in brackets) aggregated by country, elite status and gender:

  China      elite   male:   0.360 (1.534)
  China      elite female:  -0.338 (1.046)
  China  non-elite   male:  -0.730 (0.623)
  China  non-elite female:  -0.791 (0.514)
  India      elite   male:   0.181 (1.304)
  India      elite female:  -0.538 (0.918)
  India  non-elite   male:  -0.847 (0.599)
  India  non-elite female:  -0.921 (0.459)
  Russia     elite   male:  -0.374 (0.975)
  Russia     elite female:  -0.829 (0.602)
  Russia non-elite   male:  -0.739 (0.594)
  Russia non-elite female:  -0.897 (0.445)
  USA        elite   male:   0.872 (1.006)
  USA        elite female:   0.563 (1.174)
  USA    non-elite   male:   0.146 (0.958)
  USA    non-elite female:  -0.248 (0.818)

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

#144

Post by avmich »

jbob2000 wrote: post #80
avmich wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia is more Western than Eastern country culturally. Historically ~20% of Russia which is oldest, most populated (~80% as per Pareto rule) and influental is the western part of the country, bordering European countries.

Yes, and Russian computer scientists are still good, but obviously the US is more Western than Russia, so perhaps that is why they got beat in the competition?

According to this logic Russia should be more similar to US in results while India and China should be more distant. Do test results show that?

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

#145

Post by ajross »

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…

> This article put the gender graph at the end and moved on without discussion

The deltas between genders are quite a bit smaller than those between nationalities, though!

I mean, sure, I guess you could trigger the proverbial SJWs by pointing out the fact that a US woman is about a third of a standard deviation worse than her male classmates. But it's hard to draw firm conclusions about gender when Chinese and Indian men are at an even larger handicap relative to her.

I mean, I gotta flip this around here: why do you feel like we should be focusing on a small subsignal when the data supports a clearer, more defensible, and more hypothesis-rich conclusion about something else?

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

#146

Post by avmich »

zazen wrote: post #114
ggggtez wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Yo…

A lot of computer-related words in Russian are borrowed with small modifications from English (or from where English took them). Nobody says "electronnaya vychislitel'naya mashina" anymore, they say "computer". Same for file, register, class, object, compiler (kompilyator), algorithm... It happens that tutorials for some computer-related subjects - especially some niche ones - are available only in English. It sometimes help that programming languages use English language base for keywords, so there is less confusion with Russian words.

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

#147

Post by charlesbradshaw »

ajross wrote: post #145
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…

> This article put the gender graph at the end and moved on without discussion The deltas between genders are quite a bit smaller than those between nationalities, though! I mean, sure, I guess you could trigger the proverbial SJWs by pointing out the fact that a US woman is about a third of a standard deviation worse than her male classmates. But it's hard to draw firm conclusions about gender when Chinese and India…

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."

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

FPGAhacker wrote: post #72
Mc91 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many of my peers have resorted to streamlining for whiteboard interviews, and unsurprisingly, they end up with well-paying jobs I switched into programming and am low paid, and am doing this right now for interviews. Practicing for whiteboard interviews, or coding tests (real time online and in person). I re-read the language docs and then did (so far) 20 or so self-timed programming tests. Most of them I did in 5-…

Interview experience is just as valuable as the preparation in my opinion. I recommend you start getting some interviews at companies lower on your list and get some of that practice. Also, what do people think about triplebyte for this?

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by rizzom5000 »

bfrydl wrote: post #131
ajross wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 expe…

> 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.

I don't think I agree. You're talking about heuristics for debugging code and I'd argue that many of us apply similar heuristics to reading comprehension. Computer Science is not the same thing as reading comprehension, but I have to argue that if you're really good at one of these; you're probably potentially good at the other.

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