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Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are laboratory courses that integrate broadly relevant problems, discovery, use of the scientific process, collaboration, and iteration to provide more students with research experiences than is possible in individually mentored faculty laboratories. Members of the national Malate dehydrogenase CUREs Community (MCC) investigated the differences in student impacts between traditional laboratory courses (control), a short module CURE within traditional laboratory courses (mCURE), and CUREs lasting the entire course (cCURE). The sample included approximately 1,500 students taught by 22 faculty at 19 institutions. We investigated course structures for elements of a CURE and student outcomes including student knowledge, student learning, student attitudes, interest in future research, overall experience, future GPA, and retention in STEM. We also disaggregated the data to investigate whether underrepresented minority (URM) outcomes were different from White and Asian students. We found that the less time students spent in the CURE the less the course was reported to contain experiences indicative of a CURE. The cCURE imparted the largest impacts for experimental design, career interests, and plans to conduct future research, while the remaining outcomes were similar between the three conditions. The mCURE student outcomes were similar to control courses for most outcomes measured in this study. However, for experimental design, the mCURE was not significantly different than either the control or cCURE. Comparing URM and White/Asian student outcomes indicated no difference for condition, except for interest in future research. Notably, the URM students in the mCURE condition had significantly higher interest in conducting research in the future than White/Asian students., Competing Interests: This work was supported by a grant for the National Science Foundations. NSF-1726932 EHR-IUSE, Principal Investigator J. Ellis Bell, Co-Investigators Jessica K. Bell and Joseph J. Provost. None of the authors have a financial, personal, or professional conflict of interest related to this work. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials., (Copyright: © 2023 DeChenne-Peters et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)