The most commonly used assessment strategy in engineering courses is summative assessment, which serves to evaluate and certify the learning achievements of students. Recognising that assessment is an excellent learning opportunity, since “we learn from our mistakes”, in recent years strategies based on assessment for learning, or formative assessment, have been increasingly implemented. For these assessments to be considered “formative”, students must take them periodically and receive feedback as quickly as possible. The literature shows that formative assessment is an incentive to self-learning, guides the student towards a process of continuous improvement and has a powerful impact on academic performance. In this work we share our experience of implementing formative assessment in a thermodynamics course for engineering students, and analyse its impact on student performance in terms of pass/fail results. The strategy was implemented using the university platform, Educa-Blackboard, creating practice questionnaires with automatic correction and feedback, allowing multiple attempts. It was observed that all the students who passed the course adopted the strategy, answering the questionnaires and attending classes. It was also noted that the students who did not take part in the strategy did not pass the course.