One of my favorite classes back in university had a pretty good take on this: your grade would include two exams, then the higher of your homework scores or ano

One of my favorite classes back in university had a pretty good take on this: your grade would include two exams, then the higher of your homework scores or another exam. It rewarded hard work, but not at the expense of demonstrating that you'd actually learned things. If you were confident that you understood things, you could skip all the homework and get a perfect score. Likewise, if you'd demonstrated good understanding in the first two exams and were repeating that trend for the third, you could skip that third exam altogether. The grades people got in that class were some of the most reflective of actual understanding within my cohort (admittedly, through my lens as a fellow student)