Assessment of performance in introductory linear models courses

We have been teaching a General Linear Models approach to problem formulation and analysis to university students and applied researchers for over 25 years. The students and researchers have come from a wide variety of application areas such as education and all of the social sciences, biology, management, and operations research. The objectives of the course range from the very clearly defined to the very unclear. The range of objectives and the heterogeneity of backgrounds create difficulties in the assessment of performance. Among these difficulties are defining the objectives of the instruction, developing instruments to evaluate student performance, and methods of awarding grades.