Understanding Algorithms in Different Presentations

Within the framework of the Testing Algorithmic and Application Skills project we tested first year students of Informatics at the beginning of their tertiary education. We were focusing on the students’ level of understanding in different programming environments. In the present paper we provide the results from the University of Debrecen, the Universitatea BabesBolyai, and the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in two tasks, which are based on the same algorithm but presented in different forms. We have found that students in Hungary tend to focus on the coding details while with the students in Romania there are only minor differences in the results of the two forms. This difference can be explained by the different acceptance methods of the universities in the two countries and/or by the methods applied in primary and secondary education to solve computer related problems. We can conclude that the approaches adopted by students of Informatics in Hungary may be an explanation for the high attrition rates in tertiary Computer Science education.