San Jose State University has shot past Stanford and UC Berkeley to a top-10 spot in a ranking of U.S. universities based on a standardized computer coding test.
The school leapt to the No. 9 spot this year in rankings by CodeSignal, a San Francisco company whose General Coding Assessment is widely used by major technology companies to evaluate potential hires.
That position put San Jose State in front of Berkeley at No. 19 and Stanford at No. 25, a giant leap from last year, when the school was ranked 32nd, and from 2023, when it ranked 48th.
“This is great news,” said San Jose State engineering school dean Sheryl Ehrman, who attributed the result to eager students, talented tenure-track faculty, and part-time instructors with tech industry experience who are “really trying to impart those real-world skills.”
Whether the university could continue its trajectory to the top of the rankings would require a dramatic upset. This year and last year, Carnegie Mellon took No. 1 and Massachusetts Institute of Technology came in No. 2, while in 2023, MIT came out on top, followed by New York’s Stony Brook University, with Carnegie Mellon at No. 3.
The downtown San Jose school is an “under-told story” behind Silicon Valley’s success, said South Bay Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna.
“It’s always been such a key component of churning out engineers, churning out people in technology,” Khanna said this week. “A lot of headlines go to Stanford and Berkeley. San Jose State and Santa Clara (University) are really important contributors, and San Jose, of course, being a public school, is more accessible for folks that can’t afford Stanford or Santa Clara.”
CodeSignal CEO Tigran Sloyan said the general coding assessment is taken by the vast majority of U.S. computer science students, and is intended to provide a “data-driven view” of people’s coding ability. Students generally take it annually starting in their junior year, and can share their results with prospective employers, he said.
The 70-minute test includes four questions to measure different coding skills.
Launched six years ago, CodeSignal’s assessment has become very popular among tech and financial companies, Sloyan said.
The test, Sloyan contended, gives prospective employers a much better idea of a software engineering or software development candidate’s qualifications than a resume, which may attract an employer’s attention for the presence of a particularly prestigious school without any guarantee the student or graduate developed the commensurate skills. Every school has brilliant, average and mediocre students, Sloyan said.
“Most companies want to go beyond resumes and find great people regardless of which schools they came from,” Sloyan said.
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Sloyan believes San Jose State’s rapid climb toward the top of the university pack in CodeSignal’s rankings reflects the effectiveness of the school’s faculty and programs. “Clearly San Jose State is doing something right when it comes to tech education,” Sloyan said.
“So far, the observation is that what they might be doing different from other schools is having a more hands-on approach to education.”
UC Berkeley and Stanford declined to comment on the rankings.
Harshil Vayas, soon to graduate from San Jose State with a master’s in software engineering, pointed to the school’s tech-veteran instructors as a key benefit, along with large numbers of fellow students like him who have worked in tech and share their varied experiences with each other. The school’s location in Silicon Valley is another boon, said Vayas, 25.
“It’s somewhat a motivation when you see the tech industry around you,” Vayas said. “It helps you push to the goal.”