Anecdotally, I went to a Grande Ecole studying Computer Science: INSA of Rennes and I was an exchange student at RIT in rochester. The level of the classes and

Anecdotally, I went to a Grande Ecole studying Computer Science: INSA of Rennes and I was an exchange student at RIT in rochester. The level of the classes and exams at RIT was much lower than what I had back in france (and a lot of exams had rote learning at RIT, I remember questions like: Which companies drafted the openGL specifications? which is beyond useless and stupid.) The examples of practice projects you listed for OS and compilers are similar to what we did. We also had a fourth year practice project that lasted all the year in a 6 students team and which was really interesting: we were working on a cross platform networked Tarot game with an expert system implemented in Prolog. It was really fun :-) Of course, it also depends on the grande école or university you go to and I'm quite sure that for example MIT is much better than RIT for example.