I teach mostly smaller courses but my approach to grading has been the same for years: A combination of a semester-long group project (ending in a paper, a prototype and a group presentation) with individual oral exams about aspects of the project and of the lecture. The lecture is flanked by optional TA sessions as well as access to labs which, for most hours of the day, have some experienced/teaching people being around (this results in a lot of ad-hoc learning situations and a general diffusion of knowledge and practices).

This gives me/us a lot of angles to understand what progress has been made throughout the semester as well as to consider and react to individual differences between students. In my book, it’s also resistant to faking it convincingly throughout all modalities. However, scaling that approach to big entry level courses would require more money for teaching than any research group in Europe I’ve ever seen has available.