One piece of the final project is the Kaggle essay-scoring competition. You can follow the progress here:
https://inclass.kaggle.com/c/columbia-university-introduction-to-data-science-fall-2012/leaderboard
Also, Chris Mulligan, a Columbia student auditing the class, created this visualization that captures not just the current snapshot (as the leaderboard does), but the competition as it progresses over time:
http://chmullig.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/datascience_leaderboard.png
