<story><title>In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/education/us-students-have-achieved-world-domination-in-computer-science-skillsfor-now</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bfrydl</author><text>I took a look at the sample questions for the test, having never heard of it. It&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;And how about this lovely question:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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?&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t notice the emphasis on “different”.&lt;p&gt;Doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like a great test to me unless it&amp;#x27;s about your reading comprehension and ability to decipher code with single-letter variable names.</text></item><item><author>harias</author><text>&amp;gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajross</author><text>&amp;gt; Doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like a great test to me unless it&amp;#x27;s about your reading comprehension and ability to decipher code with single-letter variable names.&lt;p&gt;Really?  I mean, to first approximation, all software engineering work is debugging.  And to first approximation, all debugging is about carefully reading results and the code that generated them.  That sounds pretty spot-on to my eyes.&lt;p&gt;And the variable naming quip... are you serious?  One of the &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;worst&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; mistakes you can make when trying to read code for  understanding is to rely on documentation layers like comments and variable names.  &lt;i&gt;Those things lie&lt;/i&gt;.  Read the code.&lt;p&gt;I mean, obviously people do rely on those things for understanding, so when &lt;i&gt;writing&lt;/i&gt; code it&amp;#x27;s important to have good semantically and contextually clear names for stuff (which certainly can include single letter names for local symbols repeated often!).  But for debugging, you really have to train yourself to read the code, not the names.</text></comment>
<story><title>In a study of senior CS majors, U.S. students are tops in skills</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/education/us-students-have-achieved-world-domination-in-computer-science-skillsfor-now</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bfrydl</author><text>I took a look at the sample questions for the test, having never heard of it. It&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;And how about this lovely question:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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?&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t notice the emphasis on “different”.&lt;p&gt;Doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like a great test to me unless it&amp;#x27;s about your reading comprehension and ability to decipher code with single-letter variable names.</text></item><item><author>harias</author><text>&amp;gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kristopolous</author><text>Asking &amp;quot;how many 3 digit numbers are there where each digit of the number only appears once?&amp;quot; is nearly a mathematically identical problem but without the fake backstory.&lt;p&gt;Being able to go from some constructed story to a math problem is a skill that can be tested elsewhere (and really, should be assumed if someone clearly has proficient enough numeracy to do combinatorics)  Questions should be testing one thing as isolated as possible, not the same things repeatedly.</text></comment>