Ever wonder which universities worldwide produce the best coders? The answers may surprise you, at least as judged by the results of a competition posted yesterday on the HackerRank blog. The top U.S. finisher at number four was UC Berkeley. Schools from Russia, China, and Vietnam took the top three spots. The second place finisher from China was a “high school” not a university.
Posted under the headline, “Which Universities Have the Best Coders in the World?” the HackerRank competition included 5,500 students from 126 schools. “First, we defined what it means to be the “best” university. We thought it would be fairest to rank universities based on both number of participants and high scores. Our engineering team created a formula* to rank each university. Each university had to have at least 10 participants to place on the leaderboard,” according to the blog.
No doubt the results must be taken with an appropriate dose of salt but are fun and perhaps useful to look through. Here are the top finishers as scored by HackerRank (methodology on the blog):
- ITMO University, Russia, 407.39
- Sun Yat-sen Memorial Middle School, China, 387.18
- Ho Chi Minh City University of Science, Vietnam, 321.99
- University of California, Berkley, U.S., 299.48
- University of Warterloo, Waterloo, Canada, 266.59
- Petersburg State University, Russia, 260.68
- National Taras Shevchenko University of Kiev, 255.83
- Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, 254.26
- Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, 254.26
- KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 231.23
Eight U.S. schools cracked the top 50 overall. “Many of schools listed in our competition are in line with the US News & World report (Top Computer Science Programs), except we surfaced a few underdogs. Schools that aren’t normally seen in academic rankings, like Ohio State UC Irvine and North American University, all ranked in the top 50 worldwide in the HackerRank University Competition.”
Top Ten U.S. University (rank overall, institution name, score):
- 4 UC Berkley, 299.48
- 13 Georgia Institute of Technology, 195.25
- 14 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 192.11
- 36 Ohio State University, 101.14
- 38 University of Texas, Austin, 94.86
- 39 University of Washington, 88.52
- 47 UC Irvine, 73.34
- 50 North American University, 68.52
- 55 University of Southern California, 60.08
- 62 UCLA, 49.95
More details about the competition are available on the full blog: http://blog.hackerrank.com/which-universities-have-the-best-coders-in-the-word/