There was definitely special treatment for MIT grads when I was interviewing at FB/Google. At FB, all of the MIT students were split off to go to the paid sushi restaurant on campus, while everyone else went to the general cafeteria. At Google, I was told that MIT grads generally skip the phone interview and go straight to onsite (and this was the case for my interview with them too). I'm not sure how big the difference is, but they weren't school-blind.
When interviewing at Google, I also skipped the phone interview and went straight onsite because of where my degree was from. Or at least, that's what the recruiter said.
Google claims to have a lot of data backing up its hiring decisions, so maybe they have internal stats showing phone screens aren't a useful further signal for certain alma maters?
MIT (and even more so for CalTech, but they don't have a world class CS program) has substantial math and science requirements that are not part of the required ABET CS curriculum. Per e.g. http://www.abet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/C001-15-16-CA...
One year of science and mathematics:
1. Mathematics: At least one half year that must include discrete mathematics. The additional mathematics might consist of courses in areas such as calculus, linear algebra, numerical methods, probability, statistics, number theory, geometry, or symbolic logic. [CS]
2. Science: A science component that develops an understanding of the scientific method and provides students with an opportunity to experience this mode of inquiry in courses for science or engineering majors that provide some exposure to laboratory work. [CS]
The General Institute Requirements for all MIT undergrads include 1 term of the calculus beyond the AP Calculus BC sequence, 1 term each of calculus based mechanics and E&M, and 1 term each of biology and wet or solid state chemistry. There's also a laboratory requirement that's satisfied by the new EECS introductory courses that replaced 6.001-3 (SICP plus EE fundamentals, now it's robotics and communications).
So a MIT (and CalTech) graduate is guaranteed to have more scientific and mathematical maturity than the generic CS degree holder from another school. It's also a degree that grew from its EE department like UC Berkeley and unlike (I think) CMU and Stanford, so there's some required low level EE learning (and last time I checked most in the department get a degree with lots of both).
It's all done at a very fast pace as well, about 13 weeks of learning per se for a term (vs. e.g. the 2-3 terms that seems to be common for covering the AP Calculus sequence), so being able to learn hard stuff fast is an implicit requirement, and officially stated as a virtue, seeing as how quickly so much in so many fields including most especially computers changes so quickly.
NOTE TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS: if you want to attend MIT, don't despair. In addition to a new model financial aid system which disdains loans, the raw odds if MIT judges you can do the work are 1 in 3. Best thing you can do besides the usual things is to demonstrate in your application that you can do projects. E.g. do a significant block of programming (FOSS nowadays) work and do a good jobs of writing it up, as I did, in addition to a serious biology project at a NSSF Summer Science Training Program that would have been published if not for later realized reagent contamination.
Disclaimer: I was a MIT undergraduate pursuing a science degree, and interacted a lot with the EECS department (e.g. I lead the infrastructure part of their forced move from Multics to UNIX(TM) when MIT-MULTICS was shutting down due to Honeywell Brain Damage(TM)), and still have ties to the department.
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. When I was an undergraduate CS was a relatively new degree. I was surprised by how little rigor was in their non-cs coursework. They required one semester of calculus. (Really? Why even bother?). They required one semester of physics.
This has probably changed in the decades since since CS has matured (and, no- I don't want to name my alma mater!) but just on the face of it I can see why, based on your comment, knowing the mathematical rigor of certain schools and how they compare to other schools would allow them to skip an early filter. If a substantial fraction of their candidates bombed at the next interview level, they would probably put it back in.
It's kind of in poor taste. It's not like other top programs aren't as rigorous as MIT (they are). Also it kind of derails the thread because now we're dick-measuring over whether MIT is the most rigorous program.
It's not like other top programs aren't as rigorous as MIT (they are).
Sorry for my lack of clarity.
I said nothing good about MIT's CS program per se (quite to the contrary...), it's MIT and CalTech that remain by far the most rigorous major undergraduate universities in the US (I'm not counting the tiny humanities colleges that rigorously do things like the Great Books, and maybe I'm missing some). Something its CS graduates indirectly benefit from, but it's not inherent to the CS program, which in its post dot.com crash I have little respect for.
No others even come close in subjects required of all students; as I mentioned in a message downstream, as of the '80s the math requirement for Harvard was proving you could do algebra. On the other hand, they have the world's "best" first year undergraduate math course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55), Harvard has been very strong in math for a very long time. But serious math (and science) is not required of all students.
So, yeah, you want to measure the dicks of us CalTech and MIT alumni as a population, go right ahead, you just won't be happy with the result if you think your school as a whole is better, with the noted exceptions that still retain rigor in the humanities.
None of which says that a graduate of another school isn't every bit as good, it just wasn't required of them.
> it's MIT and CalTech that remain by far the most rigorous major undergraduate universities
Yeah that's not a fact at all; it's just your opinion. This is why I agreed with the other poster that this wasn't a great thread of argument; we're just dick-measuring based on our own experiences at this point. You can attempt to try to bring in what you believe to be "objective" measures (like course requirements), but 1) those measures are themselves questionable, and 2) the selection of criteria to judge is itself a subjective judgment.
How else are you going to define the overall rigor of colleges than by the required curriculum for all students who attend them? Here I'm returning to the wider scope that includes those small institutions that have every student read and discuss "the great books" with their peers and one or more facility members who have a clue, and others that might follow such a model of rigor.
Jibran Ludwig – recounts to me the strange tale of how he ended up here. One night two years ago, when Jibran was 15, he was sitting in an Amtrak station in upstate New York reading Plato’s Republic and getting annoyed by the translation. The Greek gods had been given capital Gs, which struck Jibran as an erroneous Christian reinterpretation, and so he decided to abandon the book and try and find something closer to what Plato had intended. It was election night. The woman sitting opposite Jibran had an iPhone. So he went over to ask her the results.
As he approached her, his Plato in his hand, she looked alarmed. “Oh,” she said after a moment. “I thought you might be one of my students and I didn’t recognize you and I felt embarrassed.” She explained that she was Susan Henking, president of Shimer, “and Plato is the kind of thing we read”.
“If the president of this college thinks I might already be there,” Jibran suddenly thought, “maybe it’s where I should be.”
You say all those things like other CS degrees skip university-level mathematics and the scientific method. Even if they did (they don't), individuals can certainly take courses, minors, or majors to add those qualifications.
In other words, why fast pass MIT grads but not applicants with MS degrees and published papers?
Maybe Google has some metrics to back up their decision, but I'm skeptical that they can explain why the numbers are what they are.
You misunderstand me. I'll grant that Google has data to back it up. I also think not being able to explain the underlying mechanism (IQ? curriculum? selectivity? exposure to Atlantic seafood?) leads to shallow thinking, false negatives, and possibly false positives.
I can't think of much about MIT that can't be replicated by a dedicated individual. And I think the industry as a whole agrees with that. There seems to be consensus that where a degree is from matters much less as industry experience increases.
Indeed, see my comment on how the MIT admissions office looks for evidence the applicant can do projects. If you graduate from MIT without gaining such an ability if you didn't start with it, well, you've wasted your time there unless, say, you're a pure math type (even the theoretical physics types have to do Junior Lab, which I gather is a requirement of the science equivalent of ABET).
You say all those things like other CS degrees skip university-level mathematics and the scientific method.
I said nothing of the sort.
I said they only require 1 university level math course in addition to discrete math, and a vague in this short overview science requirement, let's call it 1 course with a lab component (but it could be more).
All MIT undergraduates are required to do a lot more university level math and science, more than twice as much of the former given the usual pace of other universities, and four times as much as the latter. It's not optional, and FB/Google/whatever doesn't have to do any investigation of their transcript, just confirm they graduated from MIT (or CalTech, but it's 1/4th the size and science, not engineering oriented, I doubt they see many applicants from it and those should get true red carpet treatment).
And that's without getting into intangible benefits; as a physics major mentioned to me in my first week, "everyone" who attends MIT learns how to do electrical wiring. No, it's hardly required, but any vaguely curious person will pick up a lot of science and engineering just by rubbing shoulders with 4,000+ other STEM undergraduates for 4 years.
Compare to Zuckerberg's Harvard: back when I attended MIT, the math requirement for graduating from Harvard was proving you could do algebra, and I now find its CS program is not ABET accredited. That said, it's math heavy, requiring a linear algebra course which I assume goes beyond the linear algebra taught in MIT's required 2nd calculus course (see more here http://handbook.fas.harvard.edu/book/computer-science).
Strange, but they are Harvard (and ABET has some ideas about how to teach CS that the MIT EECS department does not agree with at all, like being able to teach design per se), they were a pioneering computer institution prior to fully electronic computers, and students can fulfill some of their requirements by taking MIT EECS courses.
(Let it be said I'm boosting MIT too much, if I wanted to do pure CS, CMU would be my first choice, Stanford probably 2nd, not sure about EE derived UC Berkeley (which has in addition has all those state school disadvantages, and nowadays many fewer of the in-state ones for residents), and MIT could easily be my last choice after the department panicked after the dot.com crash cratered enrollment for the first time ever.)
As for "applicants with MS degrees and published papers", presumably they wouldn't be in the same interview track as gaggles of new graduates.
> I said they only require 1 university level math course in addition to discrete math, and a vague in this short overview science requirement, let's call it 1 course with a lab component (but it could be more).
But that's not standard for lower ranked ABET accredited CS degrees. On the other hand, just now, looking at UC Berkeley which is an EECS department, they require perhaps more math than MIT, multivariable calculus and linear algebra+differential equations courses on top of single variable calculus and of course the mandatory discrete math. And 3 science courses (a third in addition to mechanics and E&M; see http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Programs/Notes/section2.shtml).
