> But, if you don't grade something, students aren't going to put their full effort into it. Hence, exams.
I'm now in college, but when I went to high school my physics teacher would give us weekly quizes that covered the material we were learning. This quizes weren't graded but were used to assess what we had learned well and what we needed more work on. Everyone seemed to give these quizes a decent effort for pride reasons, they were still graded and handed back by our teacher but the grades were not recorded.
Now part of the success of this approach may have been the quality of the students I went to school with, I attended a selective private school, but I would think you have similarly disciplined and focused students in the CS departments at most universities, so I don't see why this approach wouldn't work there as well.
I was teaching all non-CS majors, and it was a summer course. Most of my students either had jobs or were taking other classes. I have no data to back it up, but my intuition is that if the exam had not been graded, they would have, rationally, not put their full effort into it.
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I'm not sure that your last statement is true:
> But, if you don't grade something, students aren't going to put their full effort into it. Hence, exams.
I'm now in college, but when I went to high school my physics teacher would give us weekly quizes that covered the material we were learning. This quizes weren't graded but were used to assess what we had learned well and what we needed more work on. Everyone seemed to give these quizes a decent effort for pride reasons, they were still graded and handed back by our teacher but the grades were not recorded.
Now part of the success of this approach may have been the quality of the students I went to school with, I attended a selective private school, but I would think you have similarly disciplined and focused students in the CS departments at most universities, so I don't see why this approach wouldn't work there as well.
I was teaching all non-CS majors, and it was a summer course. Most of my students either had jobs or were taking other classes. I have no data to back it up, but my intuition is that if the exam had not been graded, they would have, rationally, not put their full effort into it.