Grading homework has two reasonable objectives:
Provide an incentive for students to do the thing they should be doing anyway.
Give an opportunity to provide feedback on the assignment.
It is totally useless as an evaluation mechanic, because of course the students that want to can just cheat. It’s usually pretty small, right? IIRC when I did tutoring we only gave like 10-20% for the aggregate homework grade.
The annoyance with 10-20% means that in order to be an "A" student you have to do all the homework instead of just ace the exams which is obnoxious if you actually know the material. Edge case, I know, but that last 20% is a ton of extra work.
I wish it was only 10-20%. I'm a non-trad student at a small state school and IMO they try to inflate grades via homework. This semester I aced my exams, but only had time/energy to complete ~60% of my homework. Since it was 30% (on average) of my final grade I ended up with a 3.0 for the semester.
It is an edge case… I mean, if people are required to take classes where they already know all the material, somehow a failure has occurred earlier in the process (unfortunately it is a very common failure mode to not be allowed to try and test out of a class).
Realistically I think the more common case is to think you know the material, skip studying, and then faceplant on the test. Homework should help self-correct.
But yeah, I could it being annoying if you really do already know the material.
The course could offer nonlinear grading where you get the maximum of [exam grade, 0.8 exam + 0.2 hw]
A lot of my university professors would use this kind of strategy where your final grading structure depends on various grades you got throughout the semester, so all students could get good grades whether they ace the exam or they are terrible at exams but excel at project based learning/labs.
You're there to pass and get your diploma. If you want to excel, there are other real venues for that ambition.
In most of my classes the HW was far more valuable of a measure of ability -- assuming cheating didn't occur. For example, my compilers HW assignments much more greatly captured my learning. I just feel like a semester writing an optimizing compiler is just going to be better than the 90-120 minute final exam.
I’d probably label something that size a project rather than a homework, although I admit my definition is entirely arbitrary.
IMO the ideal class would be 4 or so students working together on a bespoke project, with weekly check-ins with some grad student teaching assistant. The goal would be to do something interesting and new. Of course nobody ever has enough teaching staff for that kind of thing.
I can say that making my homework part of my grade is a great way to actually get me to do it.
Something I didn’t love about mandatory homework was that it provided an implied “you are done” point, when really it is the bare minimum (or maybe less than the bare minimum—there’s a pretty strong downward pressure if the instructor actually wants to provide thoughtful feedback).
Before college, when I was a kid, I just had the textbooks, so I read the chapters and did the assignments… it was much better than sitting and listening in lectures, then doing some small assigned subset of the problems…