Student wellness issues are a serious emerging concern for academic departments around the world. These issues are largely due to the stress and duress that the students undergo, emanating from two key factors, namely, cognitive overload and the assessments related grade anxiety. Our pursuits of quality education and a transformational education environment would be incomplete without accommodating the student wellness strategies in our curriculum design, delivery, and operations. In this project, we present our solution to address this serious issue via major operational reforms within the Software Engineering Technology (SFWRTECH) program at the W Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology (SEPT) at McMaster University. Specifically, we have revamped the pedagogical practices with an optimal blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning by introducing modular and flexible curriculum delivery that are carefully designed to accelerate the knowledge and skills base of our students while minimizing the cognitive load in the classroom sessions. A second major change has been the transformation of the entire program to a gradeless format, referred to as the Residency Model, in which letter grades have been replaced with pass/fail annotations in the transcript. This in conjunction with optimized assessment schemas and pedagogies that encourage to students to take risks and pursue exploratory learning outside the curriculum to push the envelope of learning significantly alleviates the anxiety and stress levels of our students. On the assessment front, the assessments in every course have been revised to include opportunities to re-learn and improve the performance, use novel pedagogies of challenge-based learning and research-based learning, with overall maneuvering in the direction of portfolio-based education that is more aligned with the W Booth School's vision of industry-centric hands-on training. In this work, we present a detailed efficacy analysis from two detailed student surveys and demonstrate that these measures have enabled us to offer a curriculum without negatively impacting the wellness of the students, supporting nearly 350 students annually in the SFWRTECH program. The students will be excelling at innovation and discovery, and be transformed into lifelong learners, providing the necessary impetus to graduate an enlightened citizenry.

Keywords: Residency Model, student wellness, efficacy analysis.