Student projects in software engineering courses are traditionally graded according to the features developed/tasks completed by given deadline. This leads to two problems: cascading failure of some students in the course, and “feature hacking” by the students. In order to address these issues, we decided to shift grading to grading by applied techniques in a web development course. In this paper, we present the analysis of the impacts of our decision. For the analysis we use general student performance data from four prior years and three post-shift years, their performance in written exam and project grades in the web application development course for four years (two prior and two post change), and their feedback to the course. The results show that the shift to grading technique use has resulted in improved student exam and future performance among weaker students, reduced drop-out rates, and lowered the student feedback score for the course. The added benefit according to textual feedback from students was that the new grading scheme teaches students the best practices of agile web development better than previously possible.