During a review of undergraduate programs at the University of California at Los Angeles, Judith L. Smith, vice provost for undergraduate education, was struck by an uncomfortable realization: Too many majors demanded too little from students. Some students could graduate without ever taking a senior seminar or completing a substantial research project. The result is that students could "be pedestrians and walk through the major." Just as UCLA had done when it revised its general-education requirements, the university saw that it needed to reboot its upper-level undergraduate courses. The institution coalesced around the idea of capstones, which are cumulative projects that students complete near the end of college. Officials instituted capstone projects, unusual for a university of its size. They have had some success, but there are trade-offs. Lopsided student-to-faculty ratios do not enable frequent contact with professors, and the sheer variety of disciplines can mean an equally wide array of cumulative experiences, all of which may be called a capstone, but which have few similarities.