The funniest thing about this clickbait research is that the title says STEM but the metric used is some throwaway Computer Science test scores (although the title at the place I read it at
). Strange generalization in the abstract to start already regardless. At best all this research proves is that US CS students are the best in the world but we might as well start throwing people into castes using the SAT with the methodology and narrative combination they are trying here.
Also from personal experience, average CS graduates even from elite (by their definition of an Uni average of 1250 SAT which is literally every state school or better) is absolutely horrible. Way too many of them can't even use the command line despite being forced to by the curriculum. But hey, turns out when you allow just about anyone to pass due to curving grades and overall low standards, the quality ain't that high. Even interactions with the average super elite such as average student at a top school like Berkeley leaves me very underwhelmed.
This also doesn't include the fact that there is no reason to take this test seriously from the perspective of the student. They try and pretend like this is a serious test for serious students but it says that to deal with motivation issues, they performed "robust" background checks and excluded people who did not finish. They also have the incredibly sweet incentive of giving you a personalized report of your test, how amazing! Imagine being some random average student in China (or any of the places) and your professor who is trying to push out another paper for the paper mill asks you to take some random foreign test you have never heard of before but hey it lines up with standards or something so I'm sure average students suddenly become motivated to take it seriously.
"We took several steps to ensure that examination-taking conditions were similar for all students. First, we provided the same incentives to students. In particular, students were given the option of receiving an individualized report of their examination performance. Second, to address concerns about student motivation in taking the examination, we conducted robustness checks in which we excluded a small minority of students (1.7%) that did not answer at least 75% of the items"
Another specifically laughable part in my opinion is that the test itself asks some basic architecture questions in which almost no CS student would remember unless they just took the class because most of these guys just wanna get some web dev job lol.
I think this is a
of the test they took as far as I can tell.
Have any of the CS people here heard of this? I've never heard of this before. Everyone just talks about leetcode which is probably a better measurement since everyone thinks that will land you interviews + jobs. Sure it's just data structures and algorithms but its not like the average code monkey really know anything about CS principles in the first place.
Also do you mind quoting or pointing out where they talk about Chinese students not getting kicked out and the no gain in critical thinking? I couldn't find it.