CSC490 – Effect of Internship Experience on Technical Knowledge of Graduating CS Students By Tong Zou

Context There are very few studies out there that measure the effect of internship experience on graduates How well does internship experience prepare students for jobs? Take a set of interview questions by Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc and put them as a questionnaire Separate those with and those without internship experience to measure effect Measure responses for significant variation in ‘quality’ I will detail my methods, results gathered, and conclusions.

Designing/Marking the Questionnaire Can’t be too challenging – or too simple Has to test multiple aspects of computer science 10 questions – 3 behavioral, 4 short answer, 3 algorithmic Data structures, Algorithms, Low level/System Design, Object Oriented Design Results: 16 responses, 11 PEY, 5 non-PEY Marking Rubric: 1 for no or nonsense answer. 2 for an incomplete or poor answer. 3 for a decent although inefficient answer. 4 for an answer that is close to being right. 5 for a perfect or innovative answer.

Results – Behavioral Most people regardless of internship got above 83% as their final mark on first year programming course. 3/16 (19%) got below 83, 81% above 83. PEY respondents mostly found their internship experience not very useful.

Results – Short Answer Rank these operations from fastest to slowest: Disk Seek, Context Switch, CPU access, Main memory access. Most people had trouble with context switch. What is the best or worst case runtime of Quicksort and when would you use it over Mergesort? Most people got this one right. What is a deadlock and how would you prevent it? Most people got the general idea for this question, but prevention varied. When would you use a binary search tree over a hash table and why? Most responses mentioned ordering, space efficiency, and/or choice of hash functions, all valid.

Results - Algorithmic How would you reverse a singly linked list? Different approaches, some used iteration, recursion, stack, another list. Given an array of integers, all of which appear an even number of times except for one, how would you find that integer? Most used a hash map, using Boolean or count + % 2. How would you design a generic card game using object oriented principles? We might want to implement more specific versions like Blackjack or Poker later. What classes, subclasses, methods, variables, and design patterns would you use? Most people had a class for Card, Deck, Player, methods for rules, modifying the hand, etc.

Results – Conclusions & Comparison 6/16 (37.5%) of the responses were nonsensical answers. There was a mixed co-relation between marks of those with internship experience and those without. Taking out nonsense answers, The average mark for non PEY is For PEY, it is Implications: Need more data, especially non-PEY. Problems: People had no incentive, honesty issue, self selection bias.