In this study, our goal is to examine the impact of different homework grading policies on students' final exam performance. We are interested in not only the overall student performance, but also performance of specific student subgroups with varying backgrounds as well as the impact of graded homework on the type of learning that takes place in the course. The study was conducted in a Numerical Methods course at a large university in the southeast of USA over a period of 3 years encompassing data from over 300 hundred Mechanical Engineering students.