Computer science is essential in our daily lives, and many students enter higher education each year. Institutions must ensure and improve these students’ academic success. One option is to design optional learning opportunities and e-learning strategies, often in combination with incentives. However, putting these strategies in action comes with heavy resource costs and is highly course-specific. For instructors planning those strategies, experience reports from similar courses can help to guide their decision-making process. This work presents the results of a five-year case study on the influence of incentives and continuous feedback in a software engineering course combining modeling and programming education. It explains the course structure, exams, and e-learning environment and compares the exam results of engaged and non-engaged students. For the investigated software engineering course, a statistical analysis evaluates a data set of five years of exam results and the corresponding results of a parallel incentives program. In this work, we present the benefit of incentives on exam results, a comparison between the size of the incentive program and the potential benefit, and the impact of e-learning on such a program.