Post-graduate courses are periodically evaluated in accordance with not always very clear criteria by CAPES (Co-ordinating Committee for Teaching Staff Improvement). These criteria try to measure, among other things, academic productivity (including quantity and quality of scientific production), number of classes given by teachers, time to complete the courses and so on. Quantitative measurement of academic excellence is not generally carried out; the assessment takes into account only qualitative criteria. This article has two aims: one is to evaluate the ability of postgraduate engineering programmes to produce published scientific papers from masters' degrees and doctoral theses, the other, to measure the scientific production of each programme relative to the resources put at its disposal. In both cases, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models are used. The 12 programmes co-ordinated by the Institute for Engineering Post-Graduate Studies and Research (COPPE) at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University (UFRJ) were used as evaluation units.