Organizing competitions to improve comprehensive abilities of college students

The higher education should be oriented by social demand and it is essential to improve knowledge application ability. The application ability of students can be developed through a variety of ways. Making use of the project team work from design, developing projects to winning national award is a kind of attempt to cultivate application ability in practice. This paper first discussed some problems existing in higher education and some countermeasures to improve the comprehensive application ability of students; then the paper detailedly introduced an attempt of cultivating students´ application ability through a typical case of full-time students and adult students who worked together to complete computer courseware and won the second prize of the “Fifth session of national higher school computer courseware evaluation”.