It is clearly difficult to be completely objective when measuring the success of a system such as this. However, ARCADE has been used for two years for first year work, whilst in the second of these being simultaneously used for second year work. The consensus of opinion of all the staff who have been involved in its use (module managers, laboratory supervisors and post-graduate demonstrators) are that it is a success.
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 was 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 came from two 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 year completed just before this time of writing, 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%. 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!
There were of course some problems with the new system. Firstly, some of the staff were sceptical that the bureaucracy was necessary. However, careful diplomacy persuaded them to reserve judgement, and they eventually became convinced of both the low cost and the high gain.
On a related issue, another difficulty was persuading the staff of the need for their laboratory data to be kept accurate and up to date. This teething difficulty resulted from a lack of their appreciation of the power of the system, and thus the consequences on student morale if data is wrongly recorded (e.g. an excuse not written down).
Perhaps the most difficult problem was reassuring some of the post graduate demonstrators who were affected greatly by the success of the system. This was especially true for those who worked in the second year laboratory. The previous regime had few deadlines, and so the demonstrators were used to chatting and drinking coffee in half-full laboratories during most of a semester, but with a mad panic at the end. This was so radically changed - they were kept busy from the start - that some of them worried they would be totally unable to cope if the work pattern followed the same increase as previous years. Of course, it did not!