For employers seeking skilled technical talent, one of Greater Cincinnati's largest universities may be a good place to start.
That's according to a new report from San Francisco-based CodeSignal, which ranked Miami University No. 2 among U.S. colleges for coding assessments, placing it among the ranks of:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (No. 1)
- Carnegie Mellon University (No. 3)
- State University of New York-Stony Brook (No. 4)
- Columbia University (No. 5).
Miami also placed ahead of nationally recognized engineering programs at schools like University of Illinois (No. 18) and Princeton University (No. 22).
CodeSignal, operated by BrainFights Inc., uses skills-based general coding assessments, or GCAs, to assess students' technical aptitude. The test analyzes students' code-writing skills, problem-solving skills, knowledge of algorithms and data structures and their ability to write clean code at a reasonable speed.
CodeSignal then ranks universities based on the percentage of their students whose GCA results are in the 84th percentile, which equates to a score of 800 or higher.
At Miami, 28.6% of students who took the GCA scored 800 or higher.
Eric Bachmann, professor and chair of Miami’s department of computer science and software engineering, attributes the university's performance to its curriculum. He said students at Miami begin their technical studies with "rigorous hands-on experiences" that develop strong programming skills.
"Once students are masters of both 'reading and writing,' they move on to advanced courses in areas such as graphics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, high performance computing, security, robotics, and image processing," Bachmann said.
More than 50% of U.S. computer science students will take the GCA, according to Miami. CodeSignal says its platform is used by tech giants like Facebook, Uber and eBay in their talent searches, and more than 95,000 students have completed its coding assessments.
Miami’s College of Engineering and Computing has 1,881 undergraduate students in four departments on the Oxford campus, including 641 in computer science and 150 in software engineering, assistant dean Clark Kelly said. The college's overall success rate for job placement is 96.7%, according to a recent institutional research report.
Miami is the second-largest university in Greater Cincinnati, with local enrollment of 22,917, according to Courier research.
Kennedy Rose of the Philadelphia Business Journal contributed.
