Teaching First Year Physics Without Homework or Tests

In 2013 Southwestern received a 3 year Howard Hughes grant that encouraged all of the science departments to incorporate more active learning in our classes. In the 2015-2016 academic year, the Southwestern physics department began teaching two first-year physics sections. In the first section (our control group), students were assigned weekly homework problems and took three hour-long exams during each semester. In the second (our experimental group), students took randomized weekly quizzes. Students accumulated quiz points during the semester and these counted for the same weight in their overall grade as the homework and the exams in the control group. In this talk I will discuss the details of our experiment and how it has been received by students as well as faculty. I will then mention a few of the directions our experiment has recently taken especially in this age of virtual instruction.