In my biochemistry teaching, I used exams and usually made my own. I also give group homework to the students. I class I give them questions and their answers will give me information the level of their understanding and achievement in the learning objects.

In my teaching, I used orall exams, before that I gave them a homework

then we discusse the answers

Thank you for your answers thus far! I also use similar techniques, but I am looking to see what formative and comparative assessment techniques you use. For instance, how do you know that your testing/teaching style is working? How do you know they have achieved competence comparable to other biochemistry courses? Any insight would be very helpful to me!

For instant, you can confront them with totally unexpected problems and issues and see how they react/perform.

I for myself often change some of the lab course experiments I have/had to supervise: "You all read the script we gave you? Fine, screw it. We will do a little different today. The (standard) samples you should analyze are kind of boring. Therefore, I brought this much more interesting thing here and we will figure out how to do..."

In analytical chemistry this is rather easy: you just use as much real samples as possible - even if you do not know the result. And change them. As often as you can. And then: watch. See how they apply - rather then just repeat - their knowledge. It works and is so much fun to see :)

I also suggest that - as long as it is possible and even your spare time is low - you do one of the lab course classes/groups (whatever your system is) yourself. With this you get instant feedback by the students - and can counter problems with your lecture(s) or seminars.

You can also do this in seminars or lectures: Confront them (at the end - after you provided them with the information) with problems, real problems! And let them discuss (and watch)!

Do you know the episodes of House M.D., where he has to do lectures in "diagnostics"? He just sits there and thinks of different "cases" he discusses with the students. I image that this is hard with large groups of undergrade students - but for oral exams, maybe? In smaller groups? Discuss a problem and see how everyone performs? But of course that will not work for every lecture or course.

Just my two cent on this topic :)

Instead of following the laboratory manual, I usually modify the methods used and allow students to bring biological samples for analysis. I also teach them how to perform simple statistics using Microsoft Excel and SPSS. What I would like to propose someday is to conduct a mini paper presentation by applying what they learned in the course. Research is a good way to know whether students learned concepts correctly although evaluation is hard. In that case, we can use Rubrics tool.