Another suggestion to add on:

 

When the students do an end-of-unit assessment, does it assess their application skills?  

 

Yes, the integrative assignments (end of unit application exercises) do assess their application skills.  They (the IAs) require them to apply the course material to a 'suboptimal performance problem (drawn from a sport-related movie... e.g., Mighty Ducks).  The IAs (there are 3) usually come after 3 RATs and both team and individual efforts are graded.  The application exercises that I haven't (in the past) been grading are the ones that follow a single RAT and build towards the integrative assignments.  . 

 

If the RATs show when students are ready to move on to working on applications, and if applications are the important part of the course learning, then end-of-unit assessments where they show evidence of their application skills will reward those who stayed to work on their application skills in class.   The first end-of-unit assessment can be very instructive about what they need to “practice” to be ready for their assessments. Hopefully, fewer of them will choose to “go out for ice cream” after the RATS. 

 

One would hope that this would be true... that once they see the benefit of staying for the integrative assignments (end-of-unit application exercises) they would stay.  However, it's been my experience that once get the idea that it's OK (b/c they don't loose points) to leave after the RAT, they won't change their minds later in the semester and start staying.  They just see their poor grades on the IAs as 'my fault' for not telling them exactly what to do.  They don't know what we did in class and how the ungraded class activities after the RATs built up to the IA.  They think those who got better grades were just 'smarter' or 'luckier' then they were.  In short, they don't own the consequences.  There, that's an idea.  Anyone who leaves class early will be asked to sign a sheet acknowledging the fact that they are leaving class early and that they will miss important prepartion for the integrative assignments and that they willingly accept the consequences to their grades that might occur.   And anyone who doesn't sign a sheet will loose RAT points.  I did something similar a few semesters ago.  I had those who did not bring a sheet of notes to the RAT (as they were allowed to do) sign a statement acknowledging that they knew they could and didn't and accepted the consquences of 'failing to prepare'.  What do you thnk?