My son and two other MEs that he worked with this year just presented their Senior Project at the year end project expo. I was pretty familiar with their project and the scope of work required to get it done (they designed and built an automated hydrophone system to plot the output in high resolution of ultrasound devices) even though the engineering and programming was way over my head.
I decided to look up Senior Projects at other schools. There’s a wide array of what’s being done at the culmination of student’s careers out there, from the very impressive to the highly underwhelming.
I struck me that this might be another way one could determine what students are taught to do in their programs, and how well they then execute.
Did you just do a search for “Senior Project” X university? Sounds like an interesting idea.
That’s what I did. I only looked at a few schools though.
Within each school there’s a range too. Also, not all schools do it the same. Some have group projects where the groups are very big. Some are individual projects. Others fall in between.
I got the idea after reading a thread on liberal arts and engineering. I’m pretty opinionated regarding the tiny programs that will remain unnamed. 
I looked up one of them and the most complicated one was on par with projects my son had done for an individual quarter class.
It’s just another imperfect piece of data.
Also Google engineering capstone.
That is interesting. Which schools did you find were most impressive based on student output?
I didn’t look at enough to make a solid judgement on most impressive. I also think that would be fairly subjective. I saw one that I thought was particularly weak though. Again, I didn’t look at a lot, nor will I in the future. My son is now done. My guess is that is where they will shake out will not be defining the best, but culling the inadequate.
That’s an interesting idea, but I imagine there is a lot of variation about how much project info is available online to the public. (A few years back I did find interesting info about a few of my son’s many group projects online. I think he had partners that posted them.). So it would be fun to see a sampling from various schools, but it might not be a representative cross-section.
I looked at student and faculty posters in the hallways of engineering buildings while touring. For a couple of schools, it was a deciding factor for application. The schools with posters that were entirely industry-focused on small manufacturing improvements were a no (it made engineering look very tedious), the ones that were incomprehensible to us maybe meant the program was too reaearch-focused, and the most appealing schools were ones with posters that had a societal focus in medicine, health, or poverty reduction. I’m not sure reading posters had any final impact on the decision to enroll though. In the end, I think my child chose based on the shiniest, coolest lab facilities.
I didn’t think to look for senior projects, that would have been interesting. Someone on CC had posted that ABET programs were not all the same – that some programs provided more depth in the same basic courses than others. I wondered when I read that how she would know as an applicant which ABET-accredited programs were “better” – the final projects might have helped us discern that.