Abstract Teaching refactoring effectively while making students realize the importance and benefits of refactoring is a challenge. In this direction, an experiment was carried out while conducting the course project for the Refactoring and Design Patterns course. This paper discusses the results of the experiment that involved two different project schemes to carry out refactoring activities on the same code base. One scheme was post-enhancement refactoring and the other was pre-enhancement refactoring. The aim of the experiment was to decide which scheme was beneficial in terms of better understanding, appreciation, and implementation of refactoring.