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Running research-oriented final year projects for CS and IS students

Article  in  ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · January 2003

DOI: 10.1145/792548.611938 · Source: DBLP

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 Running Research-Oriented Final Year Projects
for CS and IS Students
B. Olsson, M. Berndtsson, B. Lundell
Department of Computer Science
University of Skövde
SE-541 28 Skövde, Sweden
{bjorne,spiff,bjorn}@ida.his.se
Abstract
In this paper we discuss the difficulties of designing and run-
ning a final year project course for computer science and
information systems students. In particular, we present the
design of a research-oriented final year project course, where
the aim is to develop the student’s critical thinking and re-
search skills. We also discuss the lessons learnt during the
seven years that the course has been given.
Categories & Subject Descriptors: K.3 [Computers & Edu-
cation]: Computer & Information Science Education - Com-
puter Science Education.
General Terms: Management.
Keywords: Final year projects, examiners, supervisors, pro-
cess, research in undergraduate projects.
1 Introduction
Much of the focus in discussions of CS teaching is on intro-
ductory and intermediate courses in the core CS curriculum,
such as algorithm theory, programming, operating systems,
and database systems. How to design and teach final year
project courses for undergraduate students have not received
similar amounts of attention, although there are a few ex-
ceptions (see e.g. [1, 3, 5]).
A difficulty of designing final year project courses is that the
final year project serves many different purposes. It should
prepare students for the working life, making them familiar
with the work place by practicing their skills on real-world
problems. The final year project should also at best serve as
a test to see which students have the potential for graduate
studies, and provide students with an insight and a flavour
of research methodology that should be useful for those stu-
dents who continue studying. In addition, final year projects
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SIGCSE 03, February 19-23, 2003, Reno, Nevada, USA.
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79
J. Hansson
Department of Computer Science
Linköping University
SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden
jorha@ida.liu.se
should support the connection between research and under-
graduate teaching. Finally, the final year project should
serve as a quality control of the study program. It should be
possible to read the students’ project reports and thereby
see what they have learnt during their years at university.
The combination of all these purposes results in different
demands on the project course, and makes it difficult both
to design and to organize. For example, it may be difficult
to simultaneously meet the two goals of preparing students
for the work place and preparing students for graduate stud-
ies. Consequently, many different types of final year project
courses have been designed. A classification of different final
year project courses can be found in [5].
In this paper we describe the approach that we1 have taken
to try to meet the aforementioned different demands in the
design of our final year project course, and we discuss the
experiences we have gained from the seven years that the
course has been given. The type of final year project that we
discuss fall into the research-type category according to the
classification made in [5]. These types of final year projects
are characterised by letting students develop critical think-
ing and research skills. We also argue in this paper that we
still meet demands like preparation for work place.
2 Overview of the process
The final year project course described in this paper is taken
by all students in those study programs at the department
leading to a bachelor’s degree. The course is taken by stu-
dents from five different study programs, where the focus of
each program is either on systems programming, software
engineering, information systems engineering, development
of business information systems, or cognitive science with
an emphasis on human-computer interaction. All five study
programs have a significant computer science component,
and students take core computer science courses in mixed
groups, whereas specialization courses are generally taken
by students from a single study program.
The length of the project course is 20 weeks of full-time work,
and each student carries it out as an individual project run-
ning for one whole semester. The student is requested to
write a report of essentially the same format as a thesis,
and defend this report in a public hearing at the end of the
project. In other words, the format of this final year project
course is similar to the format typically used for master’s
1
Department of Computer Science, University of Skövde,
Sweden.
 Stage Deliverables
Define the problem Area background
Problem statement
Hypothesis (optional)
Aims and objectives
Choose methods Method alternatives
Motivation of choice
Details of method application
Develop conclusions Results presentation
Results analysis
Conclusions
Assessment and future work
Defend the work Oral presentation
Defending the work
Acting as opponent
Table 1: The four most critical stages of the final year
project process, and the deliverables that are examined
for each stage.
thesis projects, with the main difference being that the de-
mands placed on originality and significance are somewhat
lower than for a master’s dissertation. In fact, most mas-
ter’s dissertation projects are performed in the same way.
Hence, we actively aim for student projects to have an ele-
ment that is research-oriented, and a project that helps the
student to understand the role and benefits of using good
methodology in projects. The reasons for the approach is to
prepare students with research ambitions for graduate stud-
ies, while at the same time allowing other students to take
on practical problems and become well-prepared for working
as practitioners (the hypothesis is that good methodology to
problem-solving is equally useful in non-research situations).
For each of the study programs there is one examiner, who
also coordinates the supervisors of students from that par-
ticular study program. Supervisors are assigned by the ex-
aminer according to the problem addressed in the project.
The assignment of supervisors is based on a one-page project
proposal that each student hands in at the very beginning
of the course. If not based on the student’s own ideas, this
project proposal may be based on project ideas from com-
panies or from supervisors, and in either case students must
re-write the proposal in his or her own words. Once supervi-
sors have been assigned, each student regularly meets with
the supervisor, typically once a week during the project,
thus continuously receiving feedback and advice from the
supervisor.
An important aspect of this course is the use of fixed dead-
lines for different stages of the project. All students also
start their projects at the same date. The students must
deliver written chapters for each stage (Table 1), and these
will later form the final project report. Each delivered part is
read both by the supervisor and the examiner, and feedback
is provided to the student. When handing in the completed
report, students are expected to have revised earlier chap-
ters according to the feedback they received. An advantage
of forcing students to put down in writing, for instance, the
problem statement and aims and objectives at an early stage,
and having this being examined, is that badly founded ideas
can be identified at an early stage. Further, writing also
80
becomes a natural part of the project and is also done in
manageable pieces.
In Table 1 the “middle” stage of applying the chosen meth-
ods has been deliberately omitted. This has been done be-
cause the earlier stages, where the problem is formulated
and the methods chosen, are arguably more crucial for the
success of the project, and these are the stages where in-
put from the examiner can make a fundamental difference.
During the ”middle” stage of the project, the student will
be applying the chosen method, and receiving feedback only
from the supervisor.
Given that the examiner is involved at several points during
the process, the style of examination can be described as
normative. That is, the examiner does not only read and
examine the final result, but can communicate to the student
the expectations on the final report through the feedback.
In contrast to summative examination, where the examiner
only examines the thesis at the end of the project, we believe
that the advantages of this normative form of examination
are fivefold:
• Increased and more holistic understanding of the student’s
development and progress during the project, since it en-
ables the examiner to continuously follow the project.
• Improved quality of projects, since examiner feedback can
influence the student along the way.
• Improved success rate, since fundamental flaws in the
problem formulation or choice of method are more likely
to be identified and corrected at an early stage.
• Improved timeliness, since it communicates clearly the
view that the final year project is really a project, i.e.
it is something that is planned, has a specific purpose to
satisfy, lasts only for a limited time, and has a clear start
and end.
• Possibility to provide mentorship for inexperienced super-
visors.
The last point can be quite important, since there is quite
a large number of students doing final year projects every
year. This results in a need for many supervisors, which
means that new supervisors will often be brought into the
process. We find that the examiners typically spend more
time discussing their feedback at a certain stage with new
supervisors, and that these discussions often concern clarifi-
cations of the expectations on the project. More experienced
supervisors tend to work more independently.
Disadvantages of the normative form of examining include
a large workload on the examiner. However, we think that
the overall workload may not necessarily increase, since ex-
amining an evolving report during the project means that
the examiner is already familiar with the project when the
final report is handed in, which can reduce the amount of
work done at the final examination. Also, a high workload
should in any case be expected to be necessary in order to
reach the goals of the final year project course.
In each year, approximately 80 students take this final year
project course, with the distribution over study programs
being approximately equal (i.e. there are approximately 15-
20 students per study program). During the seven years
(1996-2002) that the course has been given, more than 500
students have successfully completed their projects2 .
3 The actors and their roles
We have found, for at least two reasons, that it is impor-
tant to communicate very clearly to students the roles of
the different persons involved in a final year project. Firstly,
the normative form of examination we use can confuse the
student’s view of the roles of supervisor and examiner. Sec-
ondly, many projects are based on industrial collaboration,
where the student often has a contact person at the partner
company. In this case, the roles of the industrial contact
person and the supervisor must be made clear. This is to
avoid problems arising from misdirected expectations and
misunderstandings about the different responsibilities of the
people involved.
To communicate the different roles clearly to the students,
we use drawings similar to the one in Figure 1 which illus-
trate the roles of - and relationships between - the different
actors. Together with the drawings, we describe the roles as
follows: the student, supervisor, industrial contact-person,
and examiner.
3.1 The student
The student is the driving force in the project, and has the
responsibility of finding a suitable problem. This problem
should be clearly defined, and meet demands such as being
relevant to computer science, worthwhile to solve, and pos-
sible to solve given the time-frame and resources available.
The student also has the responsibility of continuously pre-
senting the current status of the project, and thereby make
it possible for the supervisor to provide feedback. Any prob-
lems that arise during the project must be brought to the
supervisor’s attention by the student, so that the supervisor
is given a fair chance to provide advice. The student is also
responsible for making the necessary contacts with indus-
trial partners, as well as for making a detailed time-plan for
the project. Through later stages of the project, i.e. after
the problem definition stage, the student is of course respon-
sible for implementing all parts of the project and keeping
all deadlines for handing in parts of the project report.
3.2 The supervisor
The supervisor should provide feedback and advice to the
student. It is important to realize that since the student is
expected to be the driving force in the project, the amount
of help and guidance received from the supervisor depends
largely on how well the student informs the supervisor on the
current status of the project. The supervisor is encouraged
to meet each student once per week at a fixed time, and re-
quiring the student to send an updated version of the project
report one or two days prior to each meeting. If exceptional
problems turn up in a project, it is the responsibility of the
supervisor to notify the examiner that things are not going
well, so that examiner and supervisor can discuss what ac-
tion should be taken. Supervisors for these research-oriented
projects include primarily faculty memebers and Ph.D. stu-
dents within the subject area.
2
The interested reader can find further details about our
research-oriented final year projects in [2].
81
3.3 The industrial contact-person
If the project is done with an industrial partner, it is essen-
tial to realize that the contact-person at the company is not
supervisor for the project. The role of the contact-person is
to provide information about the problem that needs to be
solved, to describe demands on the solution that the com-
pany seeks, etc. If the problem is too specific for the partic-
ular company to be of any general interest, it is the respon-
sibility of the student to change the problem formulation in
such a way that it meets the demands placed on the prob-
lem definition in the final year project. If the problem can
not be generalized in that way, the student should choose
another problem or another industrial partner. In all mat-
ters concerning the report writing, the student should seek
advice firstly from the supervisor and not from the indus-
trial contact-person. Our experience is that the collabora-
tion with industrial partners works well in most cases, but
also that it is crucial to communicate very clearly our view
of the roles of the partners in the collaboration.
3.4 The examiner
The role of the examiner was described already in Section 2.
It should be added here that the examiner does not nec-
essarily have expert knowledge in the topics chosen in the
students’ projects. Examiners spend most of their effort
on reviewing methodological issues, typically relying on the
supervisors regarding more technical details of the specific
topic. Even if examination is normative, as described in Sec-
tion 2, most of the work of the examiner is done at the end of
the course. Examiners are expected to have a Ph.D. degree.
4 The assessment
At a fixed deadline towards the end of the course, students
are required to hand in a complete draft of their report.
Copies of each report are distributed to the supervisor, the
examiner, and two fellow students. Each student must give
an oral 20-minute presentation of his or her project, fol-
lowed by 20 minutes of questions from the two fellow stu-
dents who have read the report. The examiner is moderating
this session, and will typically fill in and elaborate on some
questions asked by the student opponents. An essential in-
gredient in this process is also that students are assessed
partly by how well they perform their opposition. It is ex-
plained to students beforehand that they are expected to
make a fair assessment of the reports, using the same cri-
teria that the examiner uses. Our experience is that most
students prepare their opposition quite well, and read the
fellow students’ reports thoroughly and with interest. There
is, however, a tendency of student opponent questions of be-
ing a bit ”tame”, with fundamental flaws sometimes passing
unnoticed by the opponents. Therefore, each session ends
with additional questions from the examiner, who will cover
such gaps with additional questions. The examiner also com-
ments further on the questions asked by the opponents, to
make it clear to the defending student which of the flaws
pointed out will need to be rectified in the final version of
the report.
After the defence, the student is given an additional week
to prepare the final version. During this week, the examiner
also meets with each supervisor to discuss the assessment
and grade for each student. Before this meeting, both su-
pervisor and examiner have gone through the following list
 feedback assessment
Student

feedback

coordination coordination
Industrial
contact person Supervisor Examiner

Figure 1: Relations between the main actors involved in a final year project.

of assessment criteria and chosen a tentative grade for each 5 Discussion

criterion:
Before 1996, the main purpose of our final year project was
to act as a link between the undergraduate courses and the
• General industry. This approach was in a sense successful since many
students received a job offer as a result of the final year
– Relevance of chosen topic project. However, many students went to industry before the
– Originality of chosen topic final year project was completed. In addition, each program
– Significance of findings had its own process for the final year project. Consequently,
some programs had a good throughput, whereas in other
– Contribution to knowledge programs only 10-20 % of the students completed the final
– Degree to which the work is the student’s own work (as year project on time.
opposed to the supervisor’s)
Before 1996, the supervisor and the examiner was the same
– Fulfilment of deadlines and other formal requirements person, and each supervisor was responsible for 20-40 stu-
dents each year. Thus, the supervisor simply had not time
• Report to get too involved in each project. Instead, most projects
had an external supervisor at the company that provided
– Clarity of presentation feedback on the project. The quality of the outcomes were
– Consistency between different parts of the report sometimes questionable, since most students did not develop
critical thinking (e.g. everything they discovered was con-
– Degree of insight apparent from the arguments pre- sidered to be absolutely true), and only few projects used a
sented to support decisions made systematic approach for problem solving.
– Ability to differentiate between other’s thoughts and
own thoughts During the last seven years that the course has been given
we have observed both positive and negative effects on the
– Ability to handle references and quotations final year projects at our department and at companies that
– General stylistic impression students have worked together with.
On the positive side is that the rate of drop-outs has be-
• Aims,objectives, and methods come extremely low. Currently, more than 90% of students
who start the course also finish successfully. The timeli-
– Ability to define and explain the aim ness has also improved dramatically, since practically all of
– Ability to derive and explain objectives the successful students finish their project on time. We be-
– Ability to choose and apply relevant methods lieve that the explicitly defined process with its deadlines,
together with the three distinct roles (student, supervisor,
examiner) are the main factors behind the low drop-out.
• Defense and opposition
Although quality is more difficult to measure objectively, we
– Degree of insight apparent from the arguments pre- have been pleased with the level of these final year projects,
sented to support claims and conclusions and some of the best projects have been published. Old stu-
– Degree of insight apparent from discussion in response dents have also come back and informed us that the process
to relevant questions of the final year project have provided a solid platform for
their careers in industry. For example, they try to investi-
– How the student performed as opponent
gate alternative solutions to a problem, rather than picking
the first solution that comes to mind.
Although many other criteria are of course possible, we have Companies that have worked in collaboration with our stu-
found the above list to cover most relevant aspects to include dents during their final year project have mainly reported
in quality assessment of projects. two positive effects. First, students are better prepared for

82
 the work-life as problem solvers, since they are familiar with 7 Conclusions
a process for systematically solving problems using aim, ob-
jectives, and methods. By applying this process, students In this paper we have presented details on an explic-
that have started to work tend to solve problems in a more itly defined process for running research-oriented final year
systematic and complete way (and often quicker) than stu- projects. The course caters both for students who want to
dents that have not been exposed to a similar process. Hav- go directly to industry and also for students who would like
ing worked in this way, companies can let students take on to continue with graduate studies. It is characterized by i) a
more qualified and challenging tasks earlier in their careers. clear separation of the responsibilities of the involved actors
This of course affects the student’s advancement and per- (i.e. student, supervisor, industrial contact person, exam-
sonal development in a positive way. iner), ii) a normative form of examination, and iii) strict
deadlines for the critical stages of a project.
The second positive effect reported by companies concerns,
the student’s ability to write and present reports. Each stu- One issue that have concerned us over the recent years is
dent writes a report of around 40-60 pages that elaborates how to share experiences from running the process among
on what the problem is, why it is a problem, the problem’s students, supervisors, and examiners. This is perhaps es-
theoretical context, various approaches for how it can be pecially important when new and inexperienced supervisors
solved, how it was solved, how it was analysed, and conclu- are present. This is still ongoing work.
sions that can be drawn. Having written and presented such
a report also makes it easier for students to understand how Acknowledgements
to write and present good project reports within a company.
One of the negative experiences we have had is that we find We would like to thank Anders Malmsjö, Stig Emanuelsson,
the normative form of examination more time-consuming and Olof Jansson for fruitful discussions about the contents
for the examiner since it requires getting involved in each of this paper.
project at several stages rather than just at the end. It may
seem as if this should, on the other hand, make the supervi- References
sor’s work easier by having the examiner taking over parts
of the supervisor’s role (so that the total work-load of the [1] Bernat, A., Teller, P. J., Gates, A., and Delgado,
staff would remain the same). However, we have not found N. Structuring the student research experience. ACM
this to be the case. On the contrary, supervisors often seem SIGCSE Bulletin 32, 3 (2000), 17–20.
to get more deeply involved in the projects as a result of
[2] Berndtsson, M., Hansson, J., Olsson, B., and Lundell,
the examiner’s input, and rather than a reduction in work-
B. Planning and Implementing your Final Year Project
load the impact seems to be an improvement in quality of
- with Success!: A Guide for Computer Science and In-
projects. This is supported, for example, by projects result-
formation Systems Students. Springer-Verlag, 2002.
ing in published research papers.
[3] Clark, M. A. C., and Boyle, R. D. A Personal Theory
of Teaching Computing Through Final Year Projects.
Computer Science Education 9, 3 (1999), 200–214.
6 Related work
[4] Dawson, C. W. The Essence of Computing Projects: A
Student’s Guide. Prentice Hall, 2000.
Clark and Boyle [3] present an enculturation view of learning
in final year projects, where ”the key learning objectives re- [5] Fincher, S., Petre, M., and Clark, M., Eds. Com-
late to issues such as understanding about the nature of com- puter Science Project Work: Principles and Pragmatics.
puting as a discipline and the process of research”. In par- Springer-Verlag, 2001.
ticular, they highlight similarities between science projects
and computing projects. We adopt a similar approach in
our final year project course. In contrast to the approach
reported by Clark and Boyle [3], which puts a lot of respon-
sibility on the supervisor, we share the responsibility and
workload between an examiner and a supervisor. We be-
lieve that our configuration is advantageous since the total
workload is shared, and provide a better framework when
new (and inexperienced) supervisors are supervising final
year projects.
Dawson [4] presents guidelines for both undergraduate and
postgraduate students that conduct projects. As the book
is targeted for both undergraduate and postgraduate stu-
dents, the guidelines are mostly useful for research-oriented
final year projects. From a student’s perspective, it covers
most aspects from choosing a project to presenting a project.
However, as it is entirely focusing on helping students with
their projects, it does not provide much help for examiners
or supervisors who are running and maintaining the course
curriculum. For example, there is no explicit process for fi-
nal year projects presented, or discussion on the different
responsibilities of supervisors.

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