It is clearly difficult to be completely objective when measuring the success of a system such as this. However, the consensus of opinion of all the staff who have been involved in its use (module managers, laboratory supervisors and post-graduate demonstrators) is that it is a great success, and this opinion remains after five years, even though memories of previous chaos are getting dimmer!
There is a strong feeling that the students actually work much harder than they did in the days before ARCADE: and that despite the extra laboratory load imposed on them by modularization, they have less problems fitting it all in.
To date, no effort has been made to actively solicit the opinions of the students on a wide-spread basis. The problem here is that the majority of students have no other experience of university education, and all of their coursework is managed under the same regime. A few students who changed from other departments have noticed the difference, but seem to accept it as fair. The only complaints brought to the attention of the author have come from a small number of students who were unhappy about the automatic dynamic scaling factor (a feature which can be enabled to even-out the overall module averages into an acceptable range). These students were unhappy because they wanted to get 100%!
One objective statement that can be made is the measure of actual laboratory session attendance. In the academic year 94/95, the second year of using ARCADE, the first year attendance was 89%, with an explained absence of 6%, and an unexplained absence of 5%. The corresponding figures for the second year students are 82%, 5% and 13%. Subsequent years have had similar levels of attendance. Figures for the previous regimes are not available, but those who were involved typically state their educated estimate of second year laboratory attendance in previous years as starting at around 75%, dropping instantly to around 40% and then moving to 100% in the last fortnight!