Abstract: Cultivation of students' practical ability is one of the important contents of improving the overall quality of master students and realizing the high-quality connotative development of graduate education, but it has been a low priority in the process of cultivation of master students of engineering in China for a long time. The study found that there are four typical contradictions in this cultivation process: the contradiction between the practicality and contextuality of knowledge and academic and theoretical nature of curriculum teaching; the contradiction between the requirements of connotative development and the results of representational training of the graduate students' professional practice; the contradiction between the ideal mode and the formal implementation of the dual tutorial system, and the contradiction between the application orientation of the theses and the academic evaluation standard. The cultivation of master students' practical ability has the characteristics of being procedural and systematic, and its improvement needs to focus on the entire process of talent cultivation, and coordinate and integrate the four basic elements of curriculum teaching, professional practice, theses' writing and supervisors' guidance to achieve breakthroughs in difficult situations.