Students often shy away from certain material in a discipline because it is difficult. However, some of these difficult concepts are essential to the discipline. Students also figure out how much of the presented material they need to master in order to get a particular grade and at times, decide that mastering certain difficult material takes too much effort for the points that can be obtained from mastery of that material. In fact, students can graduate with Cs or even Bs in a particular class without mastering some very important concepts. To combat this potential scenario, a series of five competency assessments was developed to assess student’s knowledge of very specific concepts in Soil Fertility and Fertilizers. These five competency assessments ranged from identifying the 17 plant essential elements to completing a bulk fertilizer blend calculation. Students are required to pass all five assessments at mastery level (100%) in order to qualify to pass the course. However, students may take the assessment as many times as needed to achieve mastery. This scenario does add an extra burden on the professor or the TAs assisting with the course. Over the past several years, some adaptations have been made to ease the burden on the instructor and encourage quicker mastery. An automated grading of assessments is being developed and will be showcased.