Which colleges have the best coders in the world?
This simple question is not addressed by academic rankings. The “Top Computer Science Programs ranking of U.S. News & World Report, for example, takes into account such criteria as number of research papers produced, global research reputation, and number of conferences — but practical coding skills are not even part of their methodology at all.
In order to figure out which colleges have the best coders, HackerRank, a platform that ranks engineers based on their coding skills and helps companies discover talent faster, hosted a major University Rankings Competition. Over 5,500 students from 126 schools from around the world participated in the event.
According to HackerRank, the best coders in the world hail from St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO).
Sun Yat-sen Memorial Middle School (China) and Ho Chi Minh City University of Science (Vietnam) ranked second and third, respectively, while California’s Berkely came in fourth in this global ranking.
Another higher education establishment from Russian, the St. Petersburg State University (SPbU), was also included in the ranking, taking 6th place.
Top 10 colleges with best coders according to HackerRank. See full ranking here.
The excellence of the ITMO and SPbU students in the field of computer programming has been illustrated repeatedly over the past years. Thus earlier this year a student team from SPbU came out on top of the 40th International Collegiate Programming Contest of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM ICPC), while ITMO was placed 7th among 127 of their peers in the finals.
According to a previous HakerRank ranking, China and Russia have the best developers in the world, leaving USA and India far behind. Hundreds of thousands of developers from all over the world had participated in challenges which involved a variety of languages and knowledge domains. They were scored and ranked based on a combination of their accuracy and speed.
