i always personally preferred project work. i was never great at exams (although i did get a whole hell of a lot better at them). project work always better suited my obsessive personality and desire to really polish things. projects feel creative, homeworks and exam prep... don't. (although learning how to take exams meant learning how to make good cheat sheets and memorizing them well, so in a way it became creative)
that said for most lower division material projects are unsuitable, for that stuff the system i saw i liked the most i first saw online for an undergrad intro ai course at mit. it was pretty simple, the course had a handful of carefully designed uncurved but not tricky half exams units that were given throughout the term. the final was two half exam spaces for any units you wanted to try again, if you did well all semester, you didn't have to show up for the final, if you messed up, it's your chance to retake the specific units you wish to improve. goal: demonstrate you learned all the techniques in the course, that's it.
sometimes it felt like putting more weight on homeworks was for student comfort and to reduce stress on exams for everyone, sadly sometimes i think it had the opposite effect of producing lazier exam design and more reliance on curves. i once took a course which had no official notes, fairly weak lectures and the claim "i teach at a level above the assigned textbook." no, he didn't, he wasted everyone's time.
i once went to see a professor after the fact to go over the final, i told him explicitly i just wanted to understand the things i got wrong but he kept returning points even after multiple statements that i didn't care. this made me very sad to think that he probably sat for hours with people arguing over points rather than discussing material.
overall it felt like some professors (or maybe their students) spent hundreds of hours designing amazing courses and some spent less than ten. those in the former camp were often prickly in terms of their specific asks, but obviously in those cases it didn't matter as the care and craftsmanship that went into the course design justified any particularity. it was the waste of time courses that were the worst (even if they did sometimes come with generous mea culpa grading).
that said for most lower division material projects are unsuitable, for that stuff the system i saw i liked the most i first saw online for an undergrad intro ai course at mit. it was pretty simple, the course had a handful of carefully designed uncurved but not tricky half exams units that were given throughout the term. the final was two half exam spaces for any units you wanted to try again, if you did well all semester, you didn't have to show up for the final, if you messed up, it's your chance to retake the specific units you wish to improve. goal: demonstrate you learned all the techniques in the course, that's it.
sometimes it felt like putting more weight on homeworks was for student comfort and to reduce stress on exams for everyone, sadly sometimes i think it had the opposite effect of producing lazier exam design and more reliance on curves. i once took a course which had no official notes, fairly weak lectures and the claim "i teach at a level above the assigned textbook." no, he didn't, he wasted everyone's time.
i once went to see a professor after the fact to go over the final, i told him explicitly i just wanted to understand the things i got wrong but he kept returning points even after multiple statements that i didn't care. this made me very sad to think that he probably sat for hours with people arguing over points rather than discussing material.
overall it felt like some professors (or maybe their students) spent hundreds of hours designing amazing courses and some spent less than ten. those in the former camp were often prickly in terms of their specific asks, but obviously in those cases it didn't matter as the care and craftsmanship that went into the course design justified any particularity. it was the waste of time courses that were the worst (even if they did sometimes come with generous mea culpa grading).