15 ms·

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

148 points by howard941 8y ago

onemoresoop 8y ago
here's the outline (1) version without paywall https://outline.com/HrWjwE https://outline.com/HrWjwE (1)
- gesticulator 8y ago
  This is about caviar prices.
  - charliesharding 8y ago
    Clicking to confirm made me laugh uncontrollably in a quiet office. It is indeed an article about caviar prices
  - bfrydl 8y ago
    Wow, just goes to show you journalists will editorialize anything!
- adjkant 8y ago
  One not about caviar: https://outline.com/ewEegB https://outline.com/ewEegB
- gbear605 8y ago
  I’m not sure if this is a deep commentary about how increased Chinese supply corresponds to decreased money for American producers, or if this was the wrong link. Either way, an interesting article to read!
harias 8y ago
> 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 well-paying jobs.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  There is also huge variation within countries. The curriculum is basically up to each college or university in the US. I never took this test.
  - gyc 8y ago
    I would assume ABET certified programs would have certain standards or requirements regarding he schools’ curriculums.
    - harias 8y ago
      There are 5 Universities in India with ABET certified courses. None rank among the top 30 in the nation.
    - mattkrause 8y ago
      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.
      - mywittyname 8y ago
        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.
        mattkrause 8y ago
        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-chemical-engineering.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i48/time-leave-behind-chemic...)
guitarbill 8y ago
> When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, and Russia. So much for "world domination".
- t_fatus 8y ago
  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
  - jhall1468 8y ago
    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 programs for CS are lacking if you didn't go to a school named Oxford or Cambridge. There's a lot of ways you can measure which country has the better educational system for a given degree type, but there's very few metrics that indicate anything other than the EU being way behind the US.
    - t_fatus 8y ago
      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 average)
      - jhall1468 8y ago
        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).
beezlebubba 8y ago
Meanwhile, most computer science jobs are not in the U.S.
- sidlls 8y ago
  On average the best paying and most technically interesting ones are.
  - martin_a 8y ago
    > 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.
    - googlemike 8y ago
      Europe has absolutely no innovation culture and tons of problems retaining founders. Anecdotally, I've found the bar for European engineers in Europe compared to American engineers an order of magnitude lower.
    - jhall1468 8y ago
      You do realize that the top paying employers in the EU aren't "the next Google" or "the next Facebook" they are actual Google and actual Facebook. In fact, the top tech employers in the EU by average annual compensation is literally a list of US tech companies and SAP. So you're correct, the EU has failed in building the next Google and Facebook, because the majority of top-tier EU CS grads already work for them.
    - ChuckNorris89 8y ago
      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 first.
crazynick4 8y ago
It could be that my memory of hypothesis testing is outdated, but being 1 standard deviation away from the mean isn't evidence of a significant difference in skills.
- rwj 8y ago
  Except that this isn't hypothesis testing. The graphs are not clearly labelled, but I'm interpreting the results as indicating that the entire population is shifted. This would be a significant advantage. (If it was hypothesis testing, 1 sigma could be statistically significant depending on sample size. You might be confusing the population variance with the sample mean variance.)
  - crazynick4 8y ago
    > You might be confusing the population variance with the sample mean variance. That's exactly what I'm doing - thanks for pointing that out.
- hopler 8y ago
  You are likely conflating sample mean with p values. 1 standard deviation in mean is substantial. That means approximately that 80% of one group exceeds performance of the median of the other group.
IloveHN84 8y ago
Of course, they get all the money of rich parents, because other countries can't keep up.
hopler 8y ago
I wonder how well US students would ranked on a test written by Russian, Indian, of Chinese testing company instead of a USA testing company.
- orting 8y ago
  This is a good point. From the article "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. The exam was translated for the students in China and Russia." It seems reasonable to expect a test written for a specific education system (either implicitly or explicitly) will be biased against others. On the other hand, it is not that surprising that the US is a the top. It is a pretty big country with a long tradition for high quality education and a lot of funds going into CS departments. However, I will be surprised if this is not changing towards more dominance by India and China, because both countries are focusing a lot of resources in this area.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- notus 8y ago
  The US contributes more to CS research than those countries so they should be the standard.
martin_a 8y ago
North Korean universities rank even better! But the imperialist US university only looked at subpar universities to come up with a flattering result. (Sarcasm might be hiding around here, somewhere, but I think one could argue whether some US university should really measure the performance of their own students. It feels somewhat biased and like adulation.)
sandGorgon 8y ago
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 day ?
- umvi 8y ago
  > what are good courses for people from these countries to study so that they become more skilled ? Just my opinion, but more doing, less "learning". I've interviewed dozens of Indian candidates at my company, and I've noticed a huge problem: a good 50-60% of them know the jargon and theory, but if you try to probe deeper they don't know what any of it means. It reminded me strongly of Feynman's account of the Brazilian education system[1] Basically, I think serious students need to actually build stuff and gain a deep intuition of the concepts they are learning. There seems to be far too much rote memorization of CS concepts and jargon without deep understanding of the why and the how. [1] http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
- randomorton 8y ago
  Look up Tai Lopez and Andy Rubin and Anthony Lavendovosky.
witcherchaos 8y ago
> When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, and Russia. There are a few explanations for this 1.) Programming is an English skillset, which the native English-speaking countries have an advantage. Out of the native English speaking countries (US, England, Canada, Australia, and others), US has the biggest economy, the best tech companies that can train students as interns, and the best infrastructure to grow the students. Where as China, while it does have the population advantage, doesn't have the English capability. Chinese government is currently actively engaging in nationalism (maligning foreign brands, censoring foreign cultures, destroying churches, arresting pastors, saying winnie the pooh is an evil foreign influence), thus will have less and less English skillset overtime. 2.) more innovative/risk taking mindsets. This allows a more creative problem-solving skills amongst students. The Chinese education style is regurgitation and there is a culture of copying and cheating amongst students. Rote learning is widely practiced in schools in India as well, which isn't conducive to innovative problem solving.
- sandGorgon 8y ago
  I don't think so. I'm specifically referring to India, which is all English. All education in India happens in English - it is our primary official language. I think the difference is in the teachers. This difference is most likely originating because of the education given in univs by good professors. Everyone has access to the online courses/MOOC
  - witcherchaos 8y ago
    > All education in India happens in English That is incorrect. In urban areas in India, schools teach in English but in rural areas it's in Hindi. In urban areas, only if it's a big city, then peer to peer communication is in English. However, in other cities, the only interaction in English is with a teacher; other times is in the native tongue. And even if the students in big cities are learning mainly in English, the teachers are usually not native English speakers, which means that the grammer/pronounciation suffers. which is what you see with Indian engineers that have migrated to other countries. https://www.quora.com/What-language-is-used-in-schools-in-India-Hindi-English-or-the-provincial https://www.quora.com/What-language-is-used-in-schools-in-In...
ummonk 8y ago
> 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 because US universities teach better or because the best students come to the US for their education.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  >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 university. In my undergrad, most of my engineering classes had only one or two foreign students.
  - commandlinefan 8y ago
    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.
    - BeetleB 8y ago
      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).
    - 8y ago
mywittyname 8y ago
I'm curious to see how skills hold up in the era of "every child must code." I believe that a healthy amount of CS/CE students get into the field due to existing (strong) interest in the field. This is probably especially true of people graduating during the outsourcing era (2000ish-2012), when enrollment plunged due to fears that there would be few software engineering jobs left in the US. I'd be surprised if people in it for the money rather than interest will perform as well. If parents start pushing their children into the field because it pays well, then schools may lower standards in order to increase graduation rates, thus flooding the market with unemployable people (see: India).
Gasp0de 8y ago
What did they want to find out with this study and why did they leave out Europe? Also: Did they consider the possibility that the test was biased since it "was developed by the U.S. Educational Testing Service"? I guess the exams that Chinese students get might be different from this one, while it is probably a familiar structure for US students...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
BeetleB 8y ago
Details on the test: https://www.ets.org/mft/about/content/computer_science https://www.ets.org/mft/about/content/computer_science Journal paper is here: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116
- sha666sum 8y ago
  Of course US students perform better in a US field test. The students should also do Chinese, Russian and Indian tests translated to their languages to eliminate bias.
cf141q5325 8y ago
If buzzfeed can win a pulitzer prize, then ieee can get a magazine with buzzfeed headlines. What a time to be alive!
jorblumesea 8y ago
Completely anecdotally, but I've noticed in other parts of the world, education is almost entirely rote memorization, whereas Western education stresses more critical thinking and creative thinking. This may be more useful when it comes to CS and other subjects.
natch 8y ago
Hold on just a minute. Shouldn't they instead say “students at US schools”?
charlesbradshaw 8y ago
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 if they discuss their findings? I'm curious why they even put the gender graph in the paper. They didn't look at differences in Elite Institutions like they did for countries. They certainly have more data than I do, but I'm left to make my own uninformed conclusion. [1]:https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116
- ggggtez 8y ago
  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.
  - badpun 8y ago
    During my CS studies, a considerable number of male students were computer geeks who were playing with computers pre-uni. Female students, OTOH, were 100% oblivious of any fundamental concepts (ex. what is programming). That could explain the disparity - they had a lot of catching up to do, esp. at the beginning.
    - zanny 8y ago
      It wasn't 100% at all. If anything, I found that the only female students were the computer nerds and there were almost no "CS-curious" women enrolling. I'd also then go on to say in my experience the student who went into a CS program for the stability and potential money "CS-curious" over passion for it might do better on scholastic tests of computer science while being less capable of actually programming well.
blocked_again 8y ago
Does anyone know what kind of questions were asked in this survey?
blocked_again 8y ago
Does ACM ICPC has to do anything with computer science skills? Because that competetion is dominated by Russian and Asian students and US universities come nowhere close. https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results Google Summer of Code on the other hand is dominated by Indian Students. TLDR: If it's a level playing field I don't think US students would be in front of other countries.
- qntty 8y ago
  More likely, the smartest students in each country work on things that have landed older students good jobs. In US, that means preparing for interviews at big tech companies. In Russia and India, it means something different. Averages in a country don't really say much about the smartest students in that country anyway. It seems likely that the smartest students in China, India and the US are similarly gifted. If you look at the average high school student in the US, you might conclude that Americans are pretty stupid, but the averages are brought down by the obscene amount of educational inequality in the US. American CS students aren't so affected by this because they mostly come from the "good" schools.
djtriptych 8y ago
Seems like we're really just testing standard of living or per capita income. It'd be surprising if these results were out of line with figures like that. Not sure we're doing anything better than these other countries other than remaining the world's only superpower.
kevintb 8y ago
It compares only India, China, Russia, and the US, where there is a huge variation in education quality for the first 3 countries. 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..
yogthos 8y ago
Yet, Russia consistently dominates programming competitions, which strongly suggests that a multiple choice exam may not actually be representative of real world skills https://www.salon.com/2017/06/18/russian-students-dominate-at-the-computer-programming-olympics-and-american-computer-science-students-are-unsurprised/ https://www.salon.com/2017/06/18/russian-students-dominate-a...
- dh5 8y ago
  Are you saying programming competitions are representative of "real world skills"? There's certainly a correlation in the same way the exam is but you'd be hard-pressed to say more than that.
  - yogthos 8y ago
    Programming competitions demonstrate problem solving skills a lot better than a multiple choice exam if you ask me.
  - blocked_again 8y ago
    But questions asked in interviews of tech companies are similar to programming competitions than mcqs.
- nickm12 8y ago
  Programming competitions are to programming as fencing is to sword-fighting. I'm not trying to denegrate people who compete in programming competitions—they require hard work and talent like any competition, but it is a very specific set of skills that are developed which are different from real-world programming.
  - somehnreader 8y ago
    Thats also true for multiple choice tests as opposed to real-world programming.
- jldugger 8y ago
  Or that programming competitions don't represent real world programming either.
bkuehl 8y ago
In my experience, many of the best CS students from foreign countries go to U.S. universities anyways (usually in the upper tier programs). So wouldn't that mean other countries are already at a disadvantage?

148 points by howard941 8y ago

onemoresoop 8y ago

here's the outline (1) version without paywall https://outline.com/HrWjwE https://outline.com/HrWjwE (1)

gesticulator 8y ago
This is about caviar prices.
- charliesharding 8y ago
  Clicking to confirm made me laugh uncontrollably in a quiet office. It is indeed an article about caviar prices
- bfrydl 8y ago
  Wow, just goes to show you journalists will editorialize anything!
adjkant 8y ago
One not about caviar: https://outline.com/ewEegB https://outline.com/ewEegB
gbear605 8y ago
I’m not sure if this is a deep commentary about how increased Chinese supply corresponds to decreased money for American producers, or if this was the wrong link. Either way, an interesting article to read!

harias 8y ago

> 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 well-paying jobs.

daveFNbuck 8y ago
There is also huge variation within countries. The curriculum is basically up to each college or university in the US. I never took this test.
- gyc 8y ago
  I would assume ABET certified programs would have certain standards or requirements regarding he schools’ curriculums.
  - harias 8y ago
    There are 5 Universities in India with ABET certified courses. None rank among the top 30 in the nation.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    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.
    - mywittyname 8y ago
      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.
      - mattkrause 8y ago
        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-chemical-engineering.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i48/time-leave-behind-chemic...)

guitarbill 8y ago

> When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, and Russia. So much for "world domination".

t_fatus 8y ago
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
- jhall1468 8y ago
  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 programs for CS are lacking if you didn't go to a school named Oxford or Cambridge. There's a lot of ways you can measure which country has the better educational system for a given degree type, but there's very few metrics that indicate anything other than the EU being way behind the US.
  - t_fatus 8y ago
    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 average)
    - jhall1468 8y ago
      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).

beezlebubba 8y ago

Meanwhile, most computer science jobs are not in the U.S.

sidlls 8y ago
On average the best paying and most technically interesting ones are.
- martin_a 8y ago
  > 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.
  - googlemike 8y ago
    Europe has absolutely no innovation culture and tons of problems retaining founders. Anecdotally, I've found the bar for European engineers in Europe compared to American engineers an order of magnitude lower.
  - jhall1468 8y ago
    You do realize that the top paying employers in the EU aren't "the next Google" or "the next Facebook" they are actual Google and actual Facebook. In fact, the top tech employers in the EU by average annual compensation is literally a list of US tech companies and SAP. So you're correct, the EU has failed in building the next Google and Facebook, because the majority of top-tier EU CS grads already work for them.
  - ChuckNorris89 8y ago
    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 first.

crazynick4 8y ago

It could be that my memory of hypothesis testing is outdated, but being 1 standard deviation away from the mean isn't evidence of a significant difference in skills.

rwj 8y ago
Except that this isn't hypothesis testing. The graphs are not clearly labelled, but I'm interpreting the results as indicating that the entire population is shifted. This would be a significant advantage. (If it was hypothesis testing, 1 sigma could be statistically significant depending on sample size. You might be confusing the population variance with the sample mean variance.)
- crazynick4 8y ago
  > You might be confusing the population variance with the sample mean variance. That's exactly what I'm doing - thanks for pointing that out.
hopler 8y ago
You are likely conflating sample mean with p values. 1 standard deviation in mean is substantial. That means approximately that 80% of one group exceeds performance of the median of the other group.

IloveHN84 8y ago

Of course, they get all the money of rich parents, because other countries can't keep up.

hopler 8y ago

I wonder how well US students would ranked on a test written by Russian, Indian, of Chinese testing company instead of a USA testing company.

orting 8y ago
This is a good point. From the article "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. The exam was translated for the students in China and Russia." It seems reasonable to expect a test written for a specific education system (either implicitly or explicitly) will be biased against others. On the other hand, it is not that surprising that the US is a the top. It is a pretty big country with a long tradition for high quality education and a lot of funds going into CS departments. However, I will be surprised if this is not changing towards more dominance by India and China, because both countries are focusing a lot of resources in this area.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
notus 8y ago
The US contributes more to CS research than those countries so they should be the standard.

martin_a 8y ago

North Korean universities rank even better! But the imperialist US university only looked at subpar universities to come up with a flattering result. (Sarcasm might be hiding around here, somewhere, but I think one could argue whether some US university should really measure the performance of their own students. It feels somewhat biased and like adulation.)

sandGorgon 8y ago

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 day ?

umvi 8y ago
> what are good courses for people from these countries to study so that they become more skilled ? Just my opinion, but more doing, less "learning". I've interviewed dozens of Indian candidates at my company, and I've noticed a huge problem: a good 50-60% of them know the jargon and theory, but if you try to probe deeper they don't know what any of it means. It reminded me strongly of Feynman's account of the Brazilian education system[1] Basically, I think serious students need to actually build stuff and gain a deep intuition of the concepts they are learning. There seems to be far too much rote memorization of CS concepts and jargon without deep understanding of the why and the how. [1] http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
randomorton 8y ago
Look up Tai Lopez and Andy Rubin and Anthony Lavendovosky.

witcherchaos 8y ago

> When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, and Russia. There are a few explanations for this 1.) Programming is an English skillset, which the native English-speaking countries have an advantage. Out of the native English speaking countries (US, England, Canada, Australia, and others), US has the biggest economy, the best tech companies that can train students as interns, and the best infrastructure to grow the students. Where as China, while it does have the population advantage, doesn't have the English capability. Chinese government is currently actively engaging in nationalism (maligning foreign brands, censoring foreign cultures, destroying churches, arresting pastors, saying winnie the pooh is an evil foreign influence), thus will have less and less English skillset overtime. 2.) more innovative/risk taking mindsets. This allows a more creative problem-solving skills amongst students. The Chinese education style is regurgitation and there is a culture of copying and cheating amongst students. Rote learning is widely practiced in schools in India as well, which isn't conducive to innovative problem solving.

sandGorgon 8y ago
I don't think so. I'm specifically referring to India, which is all English. All education in India happens in English - it is our primary official language. I think the difference is in the teachers. This difference is most likely originating because of the education given in univs by good professors. Everyone has access to the online courses/MOOC
- witcherchaos 8y ago
  > All education in India happens in English That is incorrect. In urban areas in India, schools teach in English but in rural areas it's in Hindi. In urban areas, only if it's a big city, then peer to peer communication is in English. However, in other cities, the only interaction in English is with a teacher; other times is in the native tongue. And even if the students in big cities are learning mainly in English, the teachers are usually not native English speakers, which means that the grammer/pronounciation suffers. which is what you see with Indian engineers that have migrated to other countries. https://www.quora.com/What-language-is-used-in-schools-in-India-Hindi-English-or-the-provincial https://www.quora.com/What-language-is-used-in-schools-in-In...

ummonk 8y ago

> 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 because US universities teach better or because the best students come to the US for their education.

BeetleB 8y ago
>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 university. In my undergrad, most of my engineering classes had only one or two foreign students.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  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.
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    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).
  - 8y ago

mywittyname 8y ago

I'm curious to see how skills hold up in the era of "every child must code." I believe that a healthy amount of CS/CE students get into the field due to existing (strong) interest in the field. This is probably especially true of people graduating during the outsourcing era (2000ish-2012), when enrollment plunged due to fears that there would be few software engineering jobs left in the US. I'd be surprised if people in it for the money rather than interest will perform as well. If parents start pushing their children into the field because it pays well, then schools may lower standards in order to increase graduation rates, thus flooding the market with unemployable people (see: India).

Gasp0de 8y ago

What did they want to find out with this study and why did they leave out Europe? Also: Did they consider the possibility that the test was biased since it "was developed by the U.S. Educational Testing Service"? I guess the exams that Chinese students get might be different from this one, while it is probably a familiar structure for US students...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

BeetleB 8y ago

Details on the test: https://www.ets.org/mft/about/content/computer_science https://www.ets.org/mft/about/content/computer_science Journal paper is here: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116

sha666sum 8y ago
Of course US students perform better in a US field test. The students should also do Chinese, Russian and Indian tests translated to their languages to eliminate bias.

cf141q5325 8y ago

If buzzfeed can win a pulitzer prize, then ieee can get a magazine with buzzfeed headlines. What a time to be alive!

jorblumesea 8y ago

Completely anecdotally, but I've noticed in other parts of the world, education is almost entirely rote memorization, whereas Western education stresses more critical thinking and creative thinking. This may be more useful when it comes to CS and other subjects.

natch 8y ago

Hold on just a minute. Shouldn't they instead say “students at US schools”?

charlesbradshaw 8y ago

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 if they discuss their findings? I'm curious why they even put the gender graph in the paper. They didn't look at differences in Elite Institutions like they did for countries. They certainly have more data than I do, but I'm left to make my own uninformed conclusion. [1]:https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116

ggggtez 8y ago
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.
- badpun 8y ago
  During my CS studies, a considerable number of male students were computer geeks who were playing with computers pre-uni. Female students, OTOH, were 100% oblivious of any fundamental concepts (ex. what is programming). That could explain the disparity - they had a lot of catching up to do, esp. at the beginning.
  - zanny 8y ago
    It wasn't 100% at all. If anything, I found that the only female students were the computer nerds and there were almost no "CS-curious" women enrolling. I'd also then go on to say in my experience the student who went into a CS program for the stability and potential money "CS-curious" over passion for it might do better on scholastic tests of computer science while being less capable of actually programming well.

blocked_again 8y ago

Does anyone know what kind of questions were asked in this survey?

blocked_again 8y ago

Does ACM ICPC has to do anything with computer science skills? Because that competetion is dominated by Russian and Asian students and US universities come nowhere close. https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results Google Summer of Code on the other hand is dominated by Indian Students. TLDR: If it's a level playing field I don't think US students would be in front of other countries.

qntty 8y ago
More likely, the smartest students in each country work on things that have landed older students good jobs. In US, that means preparing for interviews at big tech companies. In Russia and India, it means something different. Averages in a country don't really say much about the smartest students in that country anyway. It seems likely that the smartest students in China, India and the US are similarly gifted. If you look at the average high school student in the US, you might conclude that Americans are pretty stupid, but the averages are brought down by the obscene amount of educational inequality in the US. American CS students aren't so affected by this because they mostly come from the "good" schools.

djtriptych 8y ago

Seems like we're really just testing standard of living or per capita income. It'd be surprising if these results were out of line with figures like that. Not sure we're doing anything better than these other countries other than remaining the world's only superpower.

kevintb 8y ago

It compares only India, China, Russia, and the US, where there is a huge variation in education quality for the first 3 countries. 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..

yogthos 8y ago

Yet, Russia consistently dominates programming competitions, which strongly suggests that a multiple choice exam may not actually be representative of real world skills https://www.salon.com/2017/06/18/russian-students-dominate-at-the-computer-programming-olympics-and-american-computer-science-students-are-unsurprised/ https://www.salon.com/2017/06/18/russian-students-dominate-a...

dh5 8y ago
Are you saying programming competitions are representative of "real world skills"? There's certainly a correlation in the same way the exam is but you'd be hard-pressed to say more than that.
- yogthos 8y ago
  Programming competitions demonstrate problem solving skills a lot better than a multiple choice exam if you ask me.
- blocked_again 8y ago
  But questions asked in interviews of tech companies are similar to programming competitions than mcqs.
nickm12 8y ago
Programming competitions are to programming as fencing is to sword-fighting. I'm not trying to denegrate people who compete in programming competitions—they require hard work and talent like any competition, but it is a very specific set of skills that are developed which are different from real-world programming.
- somehnreader 8y ago
  Thats also true for multiple choice tests as opposed to real-world programming.
jldugger 8y ago
Or that programming competitions don't represent real world programming either.

bkuehl 8y ago

In my experience, many of the best CS students from foreign countries go to U.S. universities anyways (usually in the upper tier programs). So wouldn't that mean other countries are already at a disadvantage?