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I was reading today that the Royal Society of Chemistry has posted a £500 reward to answer a mathematic quiz that the chinese use as a pre-entry level test for university. The test can be downloaded if you are interested in seeing how complex it is, but in my opinion its a million miles away from what the UK universities set. The reason this article interested me was the similarities I see in the current programmer output.

10 years ago Computer studies at A level meant you learning a programming language and having to write an actual application which gave about 30% towards your overall score. I recently returned to my old secondary school to see how the computer department had developed, the head of the department talked at length how over the years the curriculum had been watered down and that programming was no longer included. This means that a large proportion of students are entering university (and I am only talking about computer science students.) without any programming skills.

I am not going to go on a politic rant (not fun), that although the average level of intelligence is not changing (politicians try and make us believe this every year in the UK.) but the students are not being given enough challenge at an earlier enough age. I was writing programs to write chess when I was 12 years old, purely because nobody told me I should not be. And because everyone is now being pushed through university it also means the number of graduates you have to interview has become much more of a burden, in fact I have now had to resort to only interviewing students with a 1st Class degree (not sure the US equivilent.).

This is the story covered by BBC News.
Mathematicians set Chinese test

And the original article.
Royal Society of Chemistry