On a ranking announced by HackerRank.com on December 7, Bilkent University appeared in 18th place worldwide on a list of schools having the “best coders” in the world.
The recently released report ranks schools by their students’ ability to code, determined on the basis of a competition hosted by HackerRank. Over 5,500 students from 126 schools around the world participated in the event; each school had to field at least 10 participants to receive a place in the rankings. In this context, the term “coder” was used to refer either to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.
Bilkent is the only Turkish university to appear in the list. The top three schools in the ranking are the Russian Federation College of ITMO University (Russia), Sun Yat-sen Memorial Middle School (China) and Ho Chi Minh City University of Science (Vietnam). The highest-ranking US school is the University of California, Berkeley, coming in fourth.
Practical coding skills are not a part of the methodology of existing university rankings, which makes this new ranking unique and valuable. Perhaps not surprisingly, the results of the HackerRank University Competition suggest that the top universities in traditional academic rankings such as that compiled by US News & World Report are not the only places where the best coders in the world may be found.