Graduates of American universities surpass graduates of Russia, China and India
Every month we read news about the shortcomings and failures of education in the United States. If you believe the press, then elementary school in America is not able to teach students even basic knowledge, the knowledge given by the secondary school is not enough to go to college, and schoolchildren who have managed to hold out until college graduation are completely helpless behind its walls. But a very interesting statistic has recently been published, showing that in at least one particular aspect, such an opinion is very far from the truth. Despite the well-known problems of the American system of secondary education, graduates of American colleges specializing in computer science turned out to be perfectly developed and very competitive specialists in comparison with their foreign competitors.
A study conducted by an international team of researchers compared among themselves graduates of US colleges with graduates of schools of the three largest countries to which the USA outsource software development: China, India and Russia. These three countries are famous for their first-class programmers and winners of international competitions, their reputation is impeccable, and the successful actions of Russian and Chinese hackers are constantly reflected in the news. In addition, there are large domestic software markets in China and India, served by a large number of local specialists. All these factors make programmers from these three countries a very relevant point of reference from which you can compare American graduates. At the same time, many students from these countries come to study in the United States.
The study does not claim to be comprehensive and, in particular, does not compare the results of Americans with the results of graduates of other developed liberal-democratic countries like the United States. So one cannot say that the results obtained in it can be generalized in favor of the unambiguous success and total dominance of the American education system throughout the world. But the countries examined in the study were analyzed very deeply and carefully. In these three countries, researchers selected a total of 85 different educational institutions at random among the "elite" and "simple" universities involved in computer science. With each of these universities, the researchers agreed to hold a voluntary two-hour exam among students in the last year of study, specializing in programming. The exam was prepared by specialists of ETS, a company known for
With its international GRE test , it consisted of 66 questions with multiple answers in each, and was conducted in the local language. The number of questions included discrete data structures, algorithms and estimates of their complexity, problems of storing and transmitting information, general tasks for programming and designing programs. Tasks were not tied to any particular programming language and were recorded in an abstract pseudocode (just as Donald Knuth does in his work The Art of Programming). A total of 6847 Americans, 678 Chinese, 364 Indians and 551 Russians took part in the study.
According to the results of the exam, the results of Americans were much better than the results of graduates from other countries. Despite the fact that, when compared to overseas peers, American students go to college with noticeably worse knowledge of mathematics and physics, by the time they graduated from college they were consistently gaining a significantly better score in tests. This, of course, is about purely statistical differences - the results of students depend not only on the college, but also on individual abilities, so that the results of different graduates of even one college can be fundamentally different and an outstanding graduate of a “bad” college can be much better than a bad graduate of an “elite »University. However, on average, the result of Americans in the test turned out to be 0.76 standard deviations better than the result of Russians, Indians or Chinese. This gap turns out to be even greater if we divide the graduates of the "elite" and "regular" universities and compare them not in one heap, but separately - elite universities of Russia with elite colleges of the USA, regular universities of Russia - with ordinary American colleges. As expected, graduates of “elite” educational institutions showed, on average, much better results than graduates of “ordinary” schools and against the background of a smaller spread of marks among different students, the differences between students from different countries became even more pronounced. In fact, the results of the best universities in Russia, China and India turned out to be about the same as the results of ordinary American colleges. The elite American schools were on average just as much better than the elite Russian schools as the Russian elite higher educational institutions are on average better than the conventional “fence-building” colleges. It is also interesting that the study did not reveal statistically significant differences between the results of university graduates in Russia, India and China.
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Figure 1. Average test results, normalized to the standard deviation, for students from different countries and different groups of universities
The researchers tried to take into account and eliminate the possible systematic causes of such differences. For example, one of the proven hypotheses was that the best results of American universities are simply due to the fact that the best foreign students come to study in the United States while in their native country there are only worse guys. However, the exclusion from the number of "American" students of those for whom English is not native did not change the results.
Another interesting point was the analysis of gender differences. In all countries, boys showed, on average, noticeably better results than girls, but the gap found was significantly less than the gap between graduates of foreign universities and Americans. As a result, American girls, thanks to better education, turned out to be on average much more capable than foreign men. This seems to indicate that the observed differences in the results of boys and girls arise mainly from cultural and educational differences in the approaches to training boys and girls and not from natural abilities because the girl with a good education easily beats the guy who was not taught so well. Because of this, the fact that female programmers in the United States in the future, on average, pay much less money than guys, apparently does not have to do with their real abilities.
Despite all the efforts to analyze the data, the results obtained in the study, of course, cannot be considered indisputable truth. Although the researchers made every effort to perfectly translate all the tests, the company that created them was initially focused on testing American students. It cannot be ruled out that the excellent results of Americans may be related to the fact that for them such questions were simply more familiar and more familiar than for their foreign peers. However, the fact that students from China, India and Russia with completely different educational systems and tests showed approximately the same results indirectly indicates that this is probably not a very plausible hypothesis.
Summarizing all the above, I would like to note that in the USA today 65 thousand students graduate from computer science education. This number has increased significantly in recent years, but remains extremely far from the performance of China (185,000 graduate programmers annually) and India (215,000 graduates). But although it will not be possible to abandon the “import” of foreign programmers in the foreseeable future, the US research shows that American graduates are much better prepared than their foreign competitors.
From the translator: I was stung by this study and I decided to transfer it to Habr because my personal 15 years experience in IT unfortunately indirectly affects him. Of course, different graduates have different levels of training and in Russia at least a dozen of talents are truly world-class; However, the average results of graduates, the massive level of training programmers in our country, alas, pretty lame. And if we move away from comparing the winners of international competitions with a graduate of Ohio State College to comparing more or less comparable people, the difference, unfortunately, is impressive. Let's say I studied at MSU and I read the research of MIT students - and this, alas, is a completely different level. Education in Russia — not even capital-intensive programming training — follows the overall level of development of the country and with the overall low level of wages in the industry over the years, in my opinion, it only gets worse. Is it possible to somehow reverse this trend, or is it definitely time to send the children to study in the States? I propose to discuss this in the comments.
Original research can be read here.
A study conducted by an international team of researchers compared among themselves graduates of US colleges with graduates of schools of the three largest countries to which the USA outsource software development: China, India and Russia. These three countries are famous for their first-class programmers and winners of international competitions, their reputation is impeccable, and the successful actions of Russian and Chinese hackers are constantly reflected in the news. In addition, there are large domestic software markets in China and India, served by a large number of local specialists. All these factors make programmers from these three countries a very relevant point of reference from which you can compare American graduates. At the same time, many students from these countries come to study in the United States.
The study does not claim to be comprehensive and, in particular, does not compare the results of Americans with the results of graduates of other developed liberal-democratic countries like the United States. So one cannot say that the results obtained in it can be generalized in favor of the unambiguous success and total dominance of the American education system throughout the world. But the countries examined in the study were analyzed very deeply and carefully. In these three countries, researchers selected a total of 85 different educational institutions at random among the "elite" and "simple" universities involved in computer science. With each of these universities, the researchers agreed to hold a voluntary two-hour exam among students in the last year of study, specializing in programming. The exam was prepared by specialists of ETS, a company known for
With its international GRE test , it consisted of 66 questions with multiple answers in each, and was conducted in the local language. The number of questions included discrete data structures, algorithms and estimates of their complexity, problems of storing and transmitting information, general tasks for programming and designing programs. Tasks were not tied to any particular programming language and were recorded in an abstract pseudocode (just as Donald Knuth does in his work The Art of Programming). A total of 6847 Americans, 678 Chinese, 364 Indians and 551 Russians took part in the study.
According to the results of the exam, the results of Americans were much better than the results of graduates from other countries. Despite the fact that, when compared to overseas peers, American students go to college with noticeably worse knowledge of mathematics and physics, by the time they graduated from college they were consistently gaining a significantly better score in tests. This, of course, is about purely statistical differences - the results of students depend not only on the college, but also on individual abilities, so that the results of different graduates of even one college can be fundamentally different and an outstanding graduate of a “bad” college can be much better than a bad graduate of an “elite »University. However, on average, the result of Americans in the test turned out to be 0.76 standard deviations better than the result of Russians, Indians or Chinese. This gap turns out to be even greater if we divide the graduates of the "elite" and "regular" universities and compare them not in one heap, but separately - elite universities of Russia with elite colleges of the USA, regular universities of Russia - with ordinary American colleges. As expected, graduates of “elite” educational institutions showed, on average, much better results than graduates of “ordinary” schools and against the background of a smaller spread of marks among different students, the differences between students from different countries became even more pronounced. In fact, the results of the best universities in Russia, China and India turned out to be about the same as the results of ordinary American colleges. The elite American schools were on average just as much better than the elite Russian schools as the Russian elite higher educational institutions are on average better than the conventional “fence-building” colleges. It is also interesting that the study did not reveal statistically significant differences between the results of university graduates in Russia, India and China.
')
Figure 1. Average test results, normalized to the standard deviation, for students from different countries and different groups of universities
The researchers tried to take into account and eliminate the possible systematic causes of such differences. For example, one of the proven hypotheses was that the best results of American universities are simply due to the fact that the best foreign students come to study in the United States while in their native country there are only worse guys. However, the exclusion from the number of "American" students of those for whom English is not native did not change the results.
Another interesting point was the analysis of gender differences. In all countries, boys showed, on average, noticeably better results than girls, but the gap found was significantly less than the gap between graduates of foreign universities and Americans. As a result, American girls, thanks to better education, turned out to be on average much more capable than foreign men. This seems to indicate that the observed differences in the results of boys and girls arise mainly from cultural and educational differences in the approaches to training boys and girls and not from natural abilities because the girl with a good education easily beats the guy who was not taught so well. Because of this, the fact that female programmers in the United States in the future, on average, pay much less money than guys, apparently does not have to do with their real abilities.
Despite all the efforts to analyze the data, the results obtained in the study, of course, cannot be considered indisputable truth. Although the researchers made every effort to perfectly translate all the tests, the company that created them was initially focused on testing American students. It cannot be ruled out that the excellent results of Americans may be related to the fact that for them such questions were simply more familiar and more familiar than for their foreign peers. However, the fact that students from China, India and Russia with completely different educational systems and tests showed approximately the same results indirectly indicates that this is probably not a very plausible hypothesis.
Summarizing all the above, I would like to note that in the USA today 65 thousand students graduate from computer science education. This number has increased significantly in recent years, but remains extremely far from the performance of China (185,000 graduate programmers annually) and India (215,000 graduates). But although it will not be possible to abandon the “import” of foreign programmers in the foreseeable future, the US research shows that American graduates are much better prepared than their foreign competitors.
From the translator: I was stung by this study and I decided to transfer it to Habr because my personal 15 years experience in IT unfortunately indirectly affects him. Of course, different graduates have different levels of training and in Russia at least a dozen of talents are truly world-class; However, the average results of graduates, the massive level of training programmers in our country, alas, pretty lame. And if we move away from comparing the winners of international competitions with a graduate of Ohio State College to comparing more or less comparable people, the difference, unfortunately, is impressive. Let's say I studied at MSU and I read the research of MIT students - and this, alas, is a completely different level. Education in Russia — not even capital-intensive programming training — follows the overall level of development of the country and with the overall low level of wages in the industry over the years, in my opinion, it only gets worse. Is it possible to somehow reverse this trend, or is it definitely time to send the children to study in the States? I propose to discuss this in the comments.
Original research can be read here.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/450536/
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