Student effort in semester-long and condensed capstone project courses

The senior capstone course for Computer Information Systems and Computer Science majors at our university requires students to form teams, identify projects for customers external to the university, and deliver working products to their customers at the end of the course. Students, who are primarily working adults, often raise concerns about the distribution of work within their teams and between projects; and about the difficulty of finding meeting times within their busy schedules. Faculty raise concerns about whether a capstone project can be done during a 6-week summer semester. The author examined 22 logbooks kept by 6 teams of capstone students during a 15-week semester and 12 logbooks kept by 3 teams of capstone students during a 6-week summer semester. The students had been assured that logbooks would not be examined until after the grades had been assigned. An analysis of these logbooks suggests that the distribution of work varies widely across teams; depending on the team, between 5% and 80% of the project work was done during team meetings and development sessions; project effort varied by a factor of 2.5 from least to most time-consuming project; and projects in a shorter semester may get shortchanged, timewise. Also, in all cases, the distribution of workload across the semester was relatively constant.