Personal Blogs
I have been going to some engineering colleges in Pune (India) as an external examiner for Bachelor of Engineering (BE) and/or Master of Engineering (ME) projects. So far the experience is good. Students are serious and most of them usually prepare well for the presentation & demos. BE projects are generally done in groups (group of 3/4 students) and ME projects are individually managed.
It’s a well known fact that there is a market for such BE/ME projects. Past students who have completed their project previously would not mind selling to current students but of different colleges or universities in India. If you go for ‘chai’ at the tea-stalls near these engineering colleges you would most likely get the advertisement of these people/companies.
A friend of mine had gone to some conference in Pune for her paper presentation. There was a girl from a different college sitting nearby who asked her if she had any plan to write her own BE/ME final report. This means the project-market has now expanded to a new product/service of report-writing.
Just questioning the students during their final presentation to test if the project was really implemented by them is not enough. Maybe we need to think of some other way to make sure students don’t fall into this market trap.
Following are some key points which can help colleges to make sure their students do their own work/projects/research.
Students should not be allowed to do projects outside the college. Students can always do the internship but that should be different than their projects. The reason for this is there are many companies who would offer ready made projects along with certificates to students in return of some lumpsum amount.
If some good company really wants to help research then they should have a tie-up with the college and the college should then offer a sub-project of the entire research for the students.
Generally projects listed by colleges should be big enough to provide work for two/three or more years/groups. Idea here is as a whole the project would add value to the overall system. A sub project, for an individual or a group, would always take the entire project to completion. That way college can assign a professor for a particular project and over the years, he/she would surely be an expert in the topic and area. They will then be able to guide the students well.
It’s a waste of time and effort if the projects are done to optimize or enhance some proprietary solution. That way sharing code with other students will be restricted.
The code should always have FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-source Software) license. This way the code can be shared between different students/teachers/colleges. And, more than that one can find out how much a student has really contributed.
The reports should not be asked only after the completion of the entire project. Instead, reports should be collected periodically or in an incremental fashion. Eg., If there are weekly or bi-monthly meetings then the meetings should have updates in the form of a report. Thus the final report would be either a merge of all those periodic reports/docs or just build a final new report referring to these reports.
It is also recommended to keep such weekly reports available online to the rest of the students. Interested students will get an idea of what’s going on in their area of interest.
A good example of such a project that was owned by colleges and which was done batch-after-batch is ‘Mission SWAYAM’. The Project was started by COEP in 2008 and the satellite was put in orbit in 2016.
I remember my masters days from IIT. First year I was helping my guide completing the project started by a student from the previous year who could not finish due to some time limitation. I could learn so many new things from the research topic.
My final year project was actually started by another senior from the previous year and I proposed an optimization to his existing solution. There were weekly meetings and minutes of the meetings were shared on the public Wiki with updates and links for references. Same wiki helped me to write a better report.
On completion, the entire code base along with the report (including the Tex source) was made public on the Internet. This helped juniors not only from our college but around the globe. When you see some paper with reference to your work it gives a great pleasure.
Basically, process is more important than just the final product.