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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

#71

Post by kevinwang »

salsadip wrote: post #64
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…

i am lost. how can a sequence of 3 digits be 4 digits long?

They're saying that 1000 was also a choice on the multiple choice test

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

#72

Post by FPGAhacker »

Mc91 wrote: post #51
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…

> 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?

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

#73

Post by wlamond »

salsadip wrote: post #64
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…

i am lost. how can a sequence of 3 digits be 4 digits long?

He's saying there are 1000 possible PINs (000-999) if you don't have the unique digit constraint.

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

#74

Post by jhall1468 »

t_fatus wrote: post #46
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…

The point was to illustrate the fact that 'world domination' is a strange word to use when comparing against 3 countries only, leaving aside a lot of well educated students, some of who ranked as the best of their field - for instance korean and french students in ML. Plus the fact that the US dominates the tech sector has more to do with the available capital there than the technical skills of US students (on averag…

That didn't seem to be the point, since you were implying that EU students are already better and now they are working on getting (to quote you) "more better".

Like I said it's hard to quantify educational programs, but China and Russia both dominate competitive programming competitions, and have for years. Whereas EU simply doesn't (outside of occasionally wins by Poland and Czech Republic).

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

#75

Post by avmich »

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!"

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.

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

#76

Post by ionised »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #52
martin_a wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Don't make assumptions about people's lives.

I'm far from rich and am on a not-even-competetive UK dev salary. I still and pick and choose which companies to work for based on whether they align with my personal principles. It's not like there's only one company to work for.

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

#78

Post by kiallmacinnes »

salsadip wrote: post #64
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…

i am lost. how can a sequence of 3 digits be 4 digits long?

It asked how many possible choices are there, 000 through 999 is 1000 choices, just as there are 10 numbers between 0 and 9 inclusive. (Yes, the Q also said each digit must be unique, hence the real answer is 720).

Anyway - IMO this is a terrible question.

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

#79

Post by BeetleB »

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.

Grad school is indeed very different, because:

1. People are willing to pay a premium for a MS degree. In many of their home countries, a BS is of low value.

2. Funding is much easier to secure for a grad degree - both from US institutions and institutions in their home country. Probably the majority of foreigners are not paying out of pocket.

The same "average" university that had so few foreigners in undergrad were completely dominated by them in their MS program. And I think there was only 1 US person in the PhD program (granted, it was a small department and they had very few PhD students to begin with).

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

#80

Post by jbob2000 »

avmich wrote: post #75
jbob2000 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

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?
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