Would it be reasonable to make a final worth 70% of your class grade as a professor...

>overconfident freshmen and sophomores will just neglect doing any of their work planning on doing well on the exam, and then not actually put in the time to do well on the exams and end up with a hopelessly failing grade
That was me last semester, except I rose like a phoenix from the ashes when I realized I'm actually dumb and somehow landed an A at the end of it after failing half my tests.

D is the best an illiterate student should hope for.

My favorite classes went something like this.

Two midterms, each 25% of your grade for a total of 50%

The final is worth the other 50%.

No assigned homework, no extra credit, no dropped exams, make the exams balls fucking hard, to the point where they are unfinishable by all but the brightest/hardest working of students.

Scare all your students stiff of you and the class. Make most of them drop when they inevitably bonk the first midterm.

BUT, to everyone who stuck it out in the end, make the final exam easier than the midterms, and have a flat B or B- cut off for the median score in the class. Moreover, you don't assign homework, but you recommend problems and problem sets related to the material you teach. This does a couple things

Brainlet out. (Hopefully after first midterm)
Normies who work hard and pay attention and do all the recommended exercises end up with a B or better, so they're happy, but have also worked hard and thus learned a lot

And the occasional bright student can just do what they feel is necessary to do well in your class.

Honestly I feel this is the best way. The midterms are the right weight to be taken seriously and thus scare students into working harder or quitting if they do badly, and the final is big enough and easy enough to reward students who stuck it out and worked hard enough.

One more thing, my professor who did this, would actually tell us exactly how many questions were on each exam and what material each question pertained to.

But the questions were so hard most people couldnt finish them. But since everyone knew what to expect, you actually studied the right things and learned something