"While there are academic rankings, like the Top Computer Science Programs by U.S. News & World Report, there is no list that ranks colleges purely by their students’ ability to code. The criteria for the U.S. News & World Report, for instance, includes number of research papers produced, global research reputation, and number of conferences. In fact, practical coding skills aren’t even part of their methodology at all.
We decided to answer the question: Which universities have students who can roll up their sleeves and code?"
A quick and easy to see problem with this ranking is that it neglects to take undergraduate CS population into account. MIT, CMU, and Stanford are all smaller schools and will have less people that could be participants as a result. All the schools from the USA that were listed were larger public schools and although I’m not going to fact-check it I would all but guarantee that all the foreign country schools listed have a CS student population size greater than MIT. Having more students is going to result in more participants (they set a minimum of 10 participants so I wouldn’t be surprised if that immediately threw out a couple of the smaller USA CS schools) and more high scoring participants.
My opinion is that without adjusting their rankings to take into account CS student amounts and lowing the minimum barrier to be listed from 10 participants form a school to a much lower number (or if they want to keep it at 10 they could look at multiple years instead of just one), this ranking is virtually useless other than for comparing schools of similar CS student bodies.
I’m all for different metrics, but this metric is laughable - there are so many self-selection factors that come into play, and no numbers about how many people from each school competed. My guess is that many schools had no idea this was happening, a few did and made events for it, and even then, you are looking at a random sample of the CS majors in a college, if they even major in CS. My guess is that Stanford students didn’t really care do participate.
Basically, I see absolutely no useful information here beyond what universities have more people using HackerRank.
I have no dog in the fight but find it amusing every time one of these “rankings” come out people say well nothing new here it simply matches USNWR or like in this case dismiss what doesn’t fit their ideal. So somehow Berkeley, GT, UIUC, UT etc…are similarly ranked but since the others didn’t make it, it must(speculation) be for so and so.
People never agree with rankings because they are incredibly hard to do. People reject bad rankings, which are all of them, US News included. I didn’t even really look at the results here.
There are so many different scenarios for how a single test/challenge that was completed online by a random group of students (again, not necessarily CS students even) could turn out. What if a freshman found a link at a school and distributed it to close friends, all also freshman. Meanwhile, the same thing happens at another school, but seniors. Then another school organizes a full event and has the majority of their students compete. Are you going to learn anything when comparing those three groups when you don’t know which is which?
All of the “missing” schools likely did not make the 10 person cutoff. After all, internationally, only 126 schools even made the cut. That’s peanuts when there are more schools to rank in the US alone with CS departments who would contend they are in the Top 100 in the world, regardless of if they are right.
Then there’s also the factor of practice, which was even noted in the article. Some schools/clubs train for these, while others will practice coding in many other ways.
The lack of numbers about any of this makes it very hard to draw a single conclusion here.
I’m not sure what’s amusing about bringing up a ton of points about something claiming to rank departments that has this many flaws. A middle school got second place - is that from coding skill or practice at programming competitions like this one?
This isn’t about fitting any ideal, this is about grievous flaws in process and a lack of data and information.
That doesn’t mean the idea doesn’t have merit: an international coding competition taken seriously by all CS departments would be really cool. But this iteration does not accomplish that ideal in the slightest, and thus its results, no matter what they are, cannot be representative of it.
I would also note the purpose of this competition is not for ranking but to promote HackRank, which I’m sure got a lot of news users from this, motivated by what the ranking of their school would be, if they did happen to find out about it.
Lol!
Good joke. Good joke.
Like PengsPhils stated, this is more of an ad to ‘join HackerRank’ more than anything else.
First, state schools are naturally going to have more advantage for these kind of ‘rankings’ due to the sheer number of student body participating. (Quantity over quality)
Second, most students in top schools like Carnegie Mellon, MIT, CalTech, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Brown, Rice, etc. probably don’t care about these coding sites BECAUSE they have better use of their own time.
Why bother trying to be ranked on HackerRank when you can go out and research in a field you are interested in? (After all, private schools are usually famous for giving opportunities in fields one wants to research in).
Why bother trying to ‘prove’ to employers you can code through being ranked in HackerRank when you are already taking some of the most challenging CS courses in the world with some of the most capable student body (academically)?
What’s there to really benefit from being ranked in HackerRank for many students in elite universities? Companies already know these students are more than capable and time wasted on HackerRank is not going to go anywhere.
It achieves nothing and that time can be better spent on:
Doing what the students enjoy during college
Taking far challenging courses
Doing research
Being a normal human being
And who cares if you are ‘world’s top coders’ with short trivial questions?
Honestly, being able to implement a subsequence is not going to make you a better programmer.
That’s like saying, ‘the university that produces the best mathematician is the university in which students who play ‘mathRank.com’ has the highest total score’ in which ‘mathRank’ is ranked according to how many basic arithmetic questions you can solve in a given time limit.
Really talented students don’t care. They got better things to do.
Being able to solve the basics quickly and ‘efficiently’ is trivial. Who cares if you can solve like 12 questions of 5*32+2 in like 20 seconds?
Are you that desperate to prove yourself to companies because you feel your university is not preparing you enough?
That stated, HackerRank and all others sites are good for augmenting your basic coding skills.
HOWEVER, do know that these sites should be used more for ‘fun exercises’. Not for ‘ranking’ purposes.
Ranking in this way is laughable.
I thought payscale was laughable (and the numbers in there are way off and outdated and some even outright questionable). But this is just next level stupidity.
It should be more listed as:
‘These Universities are using HackerRank the most overall’
The ranking is ridiculous. I’ve sat in on countless meetings where everyone argued about what was good code and wasn’t, and I’ve never seen definitive agreement. It’s like trying to decide what’s good writing or good music. It’s very subjective. Do you want efficient code or understandable code, because often that’s the choice.