
In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills - howard941
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/education/us-students-have-achieved-world-domination-in-computer-science-skillsfor-now
======
harias
> 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.

~~~
bfrydl
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
> PINs are there?

Putting aside the value of this question in the first place, the correct
answer is 720 but it also includes the answer 1000 in case you didn't notice
the emphasis on “different”.

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.

~~~
mywrathacademia
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?

~~~
ggggtez
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.

~~~
cdf2theworld
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?

------
ummonk
> 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.

~~~
jbob2000
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!"

~~~
avmich
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.

~~~
jbob2000
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?

~~~
avmich
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?

------
mywittyname
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).

------
guitarbill
> 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
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
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.

~~~
saberience
"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!

~~~
jhall1468
> 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.

------
hopler
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
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.

------
Gasp0de
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...

------
yogthos
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-a...](https://www.salon.com/2017/06/18/russian-students-dominate-at-
the-computer-programming-olympics-and-american-computer-science-students-are-
unsurprised/)

~~~
dh5
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.

~~~
blocked_again
But questions asked in interviews of tech companies are similar to programming
competitions than mcqs.

------
BeetleB
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
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.

------
charlesbradshaw
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
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.

~~~
charlesbradshaw
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
> countries.

(From the paper)

> United States have likely similar math and science levels as students in
> Russia (Implying the difference in CS scores comes from somewhere else)

But the line you quoted was the only "discussion" on the differences in gender
in the article. I think there has to be at least something to discuss.Why is
the gender gap smallest in China? Why is there a gap at all for people sitting
in the same classes? Are there any other metrics (like age?) that had similar
differences? Did the size of the gap change when looking at elite
institutions?

To be completely fair, there was some discussion in the last paragraph in the
paper, but the only hint at what might be causing the difference was that the
women in CS aren't high achieving enough. I wouldn't count that as in depth
discussion on the cause.

> The gender gap in skills does indicate that more effort is needed to attract
> higher-achieving female students into CS [...]

Just putting a chart at stating results the end of a paper and an article
isn't a discussion. There is a gap between genders about half as large as the
gap between countries. Having questions about that doesn't imply a narrative.

~~~
ggggtez
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.

If it isn't clear: this study can not be used to draw conclusions about racial
or gender predispositions. This can only be used to show the status of
education _on this particular test_ and _for people graduating right now_. It
doesn't control for how those people got there. If you want to twist it in
some other way, that's your prerogative, but you're doing shoddy science.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> 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

This feels really disingenuous. The questions they brought up are perfectly
fine, it's you who seems to be intent on poisoning the discussion by attacking
them instead of discussing the issue.

> 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?

Nationality is not the same thing as race/ethnicity. At the very least, in the
US, a substantial percentage of CS majors are of Asian descent, not European.

~~~
ggggtez
"Did Bush do 9/11? Can jetfuel _really_ melt steel beams? Are other races and
genders worse at computer science than me because they are genetically
inferior? I'm just asking questions!" said the online poster.

Just because they measured the data, does not imply they were trying to
_explain it_. To explain a result would need a very different experimental
setup. Every scientist knows this. It's not a conspiracy if a scientist
declines to throw darts at a wall on the cause of something. In fact, they
specifically say the cause is likely _not explainable_ by the test
differences, which were too small.

"The within-country gender gaps in skills are small enough, however, that they
may explain little about gender gaps in CS graduates’ labor market outcomes".

In fact, the poster is not "just asking questions". They have a clear opinion,
and ignored the researcher's own statements to the contrary.

------
sandGorgon
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
> 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)

------
kevintb
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..

------
jorblumesea
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.

------
blocked_again
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
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.

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

------
djtriptych
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.

------
bkuehl
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?

------
cf141q5325
If buzzfeed can win a pulitzer prize, then ieee can get a magazine with
buzzfeed headlines. What a time to be alive!

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

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

~~~
sidlls
On average the best paying and most technically interesting ones are.

~~~
martin_a
> 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.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
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.

~~~
martin_a
You haven't got the slightest idea of my background but rest assured it's
rather the opposite of "well off", coming from a small village in the middle
of literally nowhere in Germany.

Maybe because of that we're holding values and standards like "do no evil"
high, because there are more important things than money.

I can't afford a house in a decent area either, but I'm pretty sure I won't
fuck up lives with my job. And I'm still making enough money to support my
family and keep everything going.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
How will working for FAANG fuck up people's lives?

~~~
mfoy_
If we somehow end up in a dystopian nightmare, I'm 99% certain it will be (at
least in part) because of one of those 5 companies.

------
crazynick4
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
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
> You might be confusing the population variance with the sample mean
> variance.

That's exactly what I'm doing - thanks for pointing that out.

------
IloveHN84
Of course, they get all the money of rich parents, because other countries
can't keep up.

------
witcherchaos
> 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
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
> 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-
In...](https://www.quora.com/What-language-is-used-in-schools-in-India-Hindi-
English-or-the-provincial)

~~~
sandGorgon
You are accurate of course - but for the entire sample set that would even be
in the running for a computer science test would be entirely native to english
for most of their lives in India.

