Depends, do you thing he'll do the research? Personally I thing the 7490 and 7492 are you're friends when it comes to digital clocks. You have to understand the internal flip flops to use them, yet their already wired in divide by 5/10 or 6/12 prepackaged.
Maybe we can give them some partials, and let them plug the pieces together?
If the student has to make up the design on paper and has no lab to try out actual IC counters, then perhaps. But we never know if that is the case, or simply a student looking to save himself a bit of time and effort.
I would really prefer them to post up a schematic and a statement of a problem with the circuit, rather than just hand out the project on demand. You can be thoroughly stuck on a problem, but still complete it successfully with the application of thought and experiment.