2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Capstone courses that integrate faculty-generated or industry-sourced projects all have a common factor and a key stakeholder: the instructor of record for the class. These individuals oversee and run a class that most departments use to assess all seven ABET Criterion 3 outcomes. The projects that these instructors choose then must motivate the achievement of these student learning outcomes. Thus, they are uniquely qualified to express opinions and give feedback on the development of a universal Project Assessment Ruler (PAR) for mechanical engineering capstone programs. Three professors from the institutions of the Author and Co-Author were interviewed with a standard set of questions to determine their observed key indicators for a successful project. One institution is a large public research university, and the other is a mid-sized private university. These question sets were designed to illuminate successful best practices as well as pain points in selecting a capstone project. The questions triangulated around 3 overarching themes: Physical Capabilities, Programmatic Capabilities, and Group Capabilities.

Physical Capability questions centered on facilities students can access and use to complete projects. Capstone programs can be run with limited internal manufacturing ability when an emphasis is placed on the Quality Assurance of and managing lead times for off-the-shelf and custom-manufactured parts sourced externally. Programmatic Capability questions focus on expertise present in the department or vested in a friendly collaborator. While the program may have physical resources, capstone instructors of record still face the hurdles of hidden assumed student capability and experience. Moreover, since capstone projects are extremely varied, arriving at an optimal design might require expertise that no member of the faculty, staff, or external collaborator team possesses. Covering these experience gaps can strain faculty. Group Capabilities questions centered on skills, personality compatibility, time investment, and specialized knowledge. Major weaknesses reported for groups as a whole included focusing on perfection at the cost of task competition, lack of experience and skill to write and carry out test protocols, lack of design decision documentation, tendency for graduating seniors with job offers to invest inadequate focus on capstone, and tendency of students pursuing ambitious graduation timelines to overload course schedules leaving insufficient time for capstone.

Key factors that made a successful project were 1) passing a test of viability based on instructors’ engineering intuition, 2) proper scope, 3) adequate support for students in managing key stakeholders, 4) not allowing scope creep, and 5) properly forming balanced groups based on Gallup strengths. Consideration of potential project pitfalls and success attributes led to the selection of a benchtop injection molding machine as the first example of a PAR capstone project to be implemented. This paper illuminates how this PAR project choice addresses challenges while leveraging benefits illuminated during the capstone faculty interviews.