Dec 20, 2016 09:46 AM EST By Beth Golden, UniversityHerald Reporter

We've seen rankings about the best technology and engineering schools, one question remains unanswered: where do the best coders go to school?

University rankings such as the World University Rankings (WUR) by Times Higher Education and the U.S. News and World Report don't often include students' actual skills in their methodologies. They are focused on research: grants acquired, papers generated, published and cited; and student admissions and retention among others.

This is why HackerRank set out to find which developers can just sit down and get it done. Fast Company reported that the company hosted an event dubbed as University Ranking Competition to determine where the best developers learn. One hundred twenty-six schools were represented in the contest which had over 5,500 participants.

HackerRank engineers developed a ranking system to identify the 'best university'. It included the number of participants in the competition and their scores. To earn a place in the leaderboard, each school had to have at least 10 participants. The company ranked the top 50 schools for around the globe.

Surprisingly, the top schools are not the usual schools we see in the popular university rankings. The Russian Federation College, ITMO University (Russia) came in first followed by Sun Yat-sen Memorial Middle School (China), yes that's a middle school, and Ho Chi Minh City University of Science (Vietnam) came in third.

The Chicago Inno picked up the best coding schools in the U.S. from the list top-billed by the University of California in Berkeley, which ranked 4th overall; the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The competition revealed that great coders can come from anywhere in the world regardless of their school's academic ranking and regardless of their age. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Middle School may be one of the most esteemed and biggest schools in China but their representatives are equivalent high school students based on western standards. Yet these kids outdid a number of colleges and universities.

The rest of the top 10 schools include: Canada's University of Waterloo at 5th; St. Petersburg State University in Russia at 6th; 7th National Taras Shevchenko University of Kiev (Ukraine); the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore and Kanpur at 8th and 9th places respectively; and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sweden) at 10th.

You can find the complete list at HackerRank.

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