Promoting student success: Goodbye to graded homework and hello to homework quizzes

In higher education, an ongoing issue is assessment of student learning. We wonder how to assess, how often to assess, why we are assessing, and even how are we, as faculty, going to handle all the grading and management of assessment. Engineering students are frequently assessed on homework, quizzes, projects, and exams, but given today's connected world, students may be copying or sharing homework solutions. Often, they do not realize how working problems is integral to their success in a class as well as to their understanding of engineering. In addition, across the disciplines we are more aware of how students study and that they often do not select the most productive studying techniques. In an effort to ensure students are studying effectively and working their own problem sets, students in an upper-level aerospace engineering course are assigned weekly homework, but instead of turning in the worked problems, they are given a quiz relating to the homework material. Because the quiz performance is now the result of the student's own effort, the instructor is not uncomfortable increasing the contribution of homework performance to the final grade which, in turn, further helps to motivate the students to put the effort originally intended into working out and understanding homework solutions. While an attempt to determine whether or not this approach benefited student performance by comparing exam and final course scores before and after the in-class homework quizzes were employed was inconclusive, the anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that it does benefit student understanding, and there is no question that the grading workload of the instructor is reduced, allowing more time to be spent on instruction where it has a positive impact.