At the University of Washington (which consistently ranks at the level of MIT and Stanford for Computer Science), someone with a bachelor's in Computer Science

At the University of Washington (which consistently ranks at the level of MIT and Stanford for Computer Science), someone with a bachelor's in Computer Science would generally be expected to complete at least two of: * Operating Systems: Either implement lock/fork, assorted system calls, and virtual memory for OS/161; or implement a device driver. * Networks: Implement the Tor protocol or a project of similar complexity. * Compilers: Implement a compiler for simplified Java including at least constant propagation or a similar optimization. * Animation: A year-long course series that culminates with animating a few-minute long movie. * A small video game. * A Maps-style program for finding the shortest walk between any two locations on campus, including displaying that information. This one was required for Computer Science. All but the last of these were done in groups of 2-3 people. It might have been theoretically possible to graduate with only one big project, if you took machine learning, security (the final project for this one was finding an exploit in Firefox, but no actual code was required), and some heavy theory classes. Most people would have done at least 3-4 big projects like this.