Comment by armchairhacker

I made another comment on this thread about that. Exams should be test important knowledge (not computation or trick questions) so they should be easy for students who learned the material, even those who traditionally have trouble with exams. Most of the grade should be frequent in-class assignments or long take-home projects, which test almost if not the same skills students would use professionally (e.g. debug a simulated server failure in-class; develop a small filesystem with a novel feature at home).

The in-class assignments should also be easier than the take-home projects (although not as easy as the exams). In-class assignments and exams would be more common in earlier classes, and long projects would be more common in later classes.