Unfortunately exams of any kind advantage some students and disadvantage others. They also favor those good at exams, not necessarily those good at the subject matter. I was always (over 40 years) a big fan of using projects to assess students. Let me describe how you might be able to make it work, provided that the scale isn't overwhelming. The course I will describe had both undergraduate and graduate versions. The number of students was normally around 30, always less than 50. My other teaching duties let me spend the majority of my time on this course. The course grade was determined 70% by a major project, 10% by a minor (warm up) project and 20% by a final exam for which any tricky or deep questions the grading was lenient. The main project took up all but 2 weeks of the semester.
To make it work, I did this. First I partitioned the overall task into subtasks and gave a point value to each task with the sum being 700 (= 70% of the course). The tasks needed to be done in order for the project to be successful. They were dependent on successful "completion" but not necessarily "perfection" of earlier tasks. The student worked in self-selected pairs, which cut my "grading" task in half.
Every two weeks the students would submit their work in a folder, including the current version of the project and all earlier versions. The changes from their previous version had to be marked with a highlighter pen so that I could easily find the changes. I also kept an index card for each student so that I could easily make notes as I looked at the work.
I would spend about 2 hours every other week going through the project folders making notes on their pages. Sometimes the "note" was just a checkmark, indicating success at the level they were at. Students could work at their own pace and could target their own desired level of accomplishment. They didn't need to complete the entire project to achieve a grade with which they were comfortable. So some pairs were on item 10 of the work schedule, others on item 8, etc.
If my notes on the work were negative they could re-do that work to earn the "checkmark" and could work on the next feature as well.
At the end of the course I would need to evaluate everything they did and assign a grade. Normally it would be easy as could keep a running tally of their progress along the way.
I also used various electronic communications (mailing list primarily) so that students could ask questions at any time. Everyone saw every question. Students were encouraged to answer questions (but not submit code) asked by others. I monitored the list daily and answered questions as needed. Every student saw my answers as well.
The project was thought to be very challenging by the students. I gave them a lot of guidance, both about the subject the project covered and things like coding, design patterns, thinking like a programmer, etc. I provided a fairly comprehensive set of tests they could use to assure themselves of their progress. The periodic reports would include the test results from running their code. I never actually had to run their code. But if it was too sloppy I'd just note that on the work and quit reading.
Only a few students hated me. Many loved me. The course was transformational as well for many of them.
The trick here is to be (a) always available and (b) to evaluate (but not necessarily "grade" frequently, without it taking so much time that your life suffers.
You can be very severe with them when needed so long as they know that today's judgement won't necessarily haunt them and that they can come back tomorrow.
One caveat. The student (pair) that has to frequently repeat work to catch up will have some difficulty with the current work and in understanding the current lecture, which was paced to the project work. You need to watch out for that and give advice to "move on" leaving a bad spot in their work. But looking at their work every two weeks let me also determine if I needed to revisit an earlier topic in the next lecture. It was pretty obvious if groups of students didn't get it.
Since students worked in pairs I needed some way to grade individuals. The small project and the exam let me get a handle on that, but I also had students to peer assessments of the form: (a) what was your partner's chief contribution, and (b) what was your chief contribution. The peer assessment always tried to let people say good things when they could, rather than asking for the bad. Grading was never a problem.
Some students learned more, some less. Most were happy enough with the course. I always thought that I was giving something of value to every student.
