2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

the past several years. These approaches emphasize student learning and mastery rather than defining achievement and success through grades. Broader adoption has resulted from the many observed benefits for both students and instructors, including lower student stress, higher student productivity, maintained high standards of academic integrity, reduced student-instructor conflict, and other factors. Alternative assessment in STEM courses has tended to be implemented in standard classroom-based courses; however, despite many non-STEM examples emphasizing its potential in writing-intensive instruction. At XXXXX, as part of a curriculum redesign, the required undergraduate Unit Operations Laboratory course in chemical engineering was developed with an intentional ungrading approach for assessment. The course utilized four modules of experimentation – discovery, heat exchangers, fluid mechanics, and separations/mass transfer, with all students getting hands-on experience with eight different experimental devices. Students completed multiple written assignments, including laboratory proposals, memos, executive summaries, and reports, as well as oral presentations, both individually and in teams. Assessment was fully implemented with ungrading: the final course grade was based on established student mastery at the end of the semester across ten course outcomes, allowing for student growth and development based on feedback received during the semester. Students and instructors both responded positively to the implementation, with student motivation as assessed by the MUSIC model being extremely high, particularly with respect to motivation resulting from believing the course design enabled success and from instructor caring. . The results of multiple iterations of implementation will be discussed in this paper. (IRB approval #24-03-17).