Four exams or Five exams? Or: SOTL research needs controls!!!
About half of the points from my BIO181 class come from high stakes exams. I feel this is necessary to prepare students for their STEM degrees, MCAT, PCAT etc. I split the course content into 5 units with an exam for each unit. This means giving up 5 class meetings to exams, which for a TR class, is over 2 weeks of class time. I tried dividing the content into 4 units, with 4 exams. The last 2 exams remained the same, but I took the content from the first 3 exams and split it between 2 exams instead.