A recent competition among universities has revealed that the best coders are not in America but in Asia. In fact, the United States come in fourth in ranking.

HackerRank, a Palo Alto-based tech company that holds programming competitions for both businesses and universities all over the world, has held a coding competition among different universities around the world to find out the best of the best in coding. The top three universities that won are from Russia, China, and Vietnam respectively.

Compared to the US News & World Report, which based their choices on the number of papers published by the university, Hacker Rank decided to get the universities' hands dirty through showcasing their practical coding skills.

The University of Berkeley, California, the best tech university in America, only came fourth in the ranking. The university to emerge as the top winner was Russia's Russian Federation College, ITMO University.

The second placer in the competition is the biggest surprise - China's Sun Yat-sen Memorial Middle School. Yes, middle school students from China bested the university students from the top university in America. Wentao Weng, the student who represented the school, said that he started learning how to code when he was only 11 years old. He said that coding is not part of the school's subject but they are encouraged because it is one of the requirements to get admitted to a good university.

To complete the Top 10 list of the universities with the best coders are Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City University of Science in fourth, the University of Waterloo in Canada in fifth place, and another Russian university, St. Petersburg State University, in sixth. Ukraine's National Taras Shevchenko University of Kiev secured the seventh place.

India's Indian Institute of Technology in Indore and Kanpur grabbed the eighth and ninth spots respectively. And to complete the list is Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm comes in number ten.