From evaluation to piloting of project-activity at Ecole Centrale de Lille

Ecole Centrale de Lille, a French "grande ecole" or graduate engineering school, trains engineers who follow a wide variety of scientific and technical fields. First of all, the students have to succeed in a very competitive entrance exam, after two years of training classes. After that, they spend three years in our school in order to become multidisciplinary engineers. An important component of the training is based on the project-activity: from his arrival, the student undertakes a project to which he devotes more than 300 working hours during the two first years. This paper discusses the project-activity in its context, specifies the goal that it represents for the training of the student, and considers the system of piloting used to optimize its success of such an activity.