Excel as a Grading Tool
If you use a paper grade book or have to calculate the grading on some assignments before entering them in the grade book, I recommend using Microsoft Excel. With basic knowledge and an understanding of calculating sums, totals, and percentages; I believe you will find Excel to be a real time saver. In most cases, you just need to enter the grades and Excel does all the calculating for you. Even though I use an electronic grade book, I still use Excel to compile data from other electronic scoring systems, in which I have to calculate a grade that I would manually enter into my grade book. Keep in mind that a lot of online testing and lab applications allow you to port the results into programs like Excel via a .CSV file.
Lan,
Perfect! When all grades are current and up to date, Excel makes it easy to see where problem areas are beginning to appear which would indicate to the instructor that conferring with the student may be necessary.
Barry Westling
I use Excel to keep my students' grades organized.
Richard,
Great! Students want and need to know their standing, and Excel can provide a great way to summarize information, at a glance, and performance to date.
Barry Westling
We use Excel as well. It just makes it easier to see where the student stands during the course of the class. If I see that a student's grades are falling or they missed an assignment, I arrange a conference with them.
Wynell,
Electronic grading is great. I've found students appreciate having the most current grades and performance posted. I still try to meet with students personally. I like to offer my suggestions, support and encouragement, and convey I care about their success. I think this helps build trust and earn respect.
Barry Westling
I am very familiar with Excel; however, I really love engrade for my ground classes. It is very easy to use and the students can see their grades as soon as they are posted. I then can download sections by topic or weeks into an Excel spreadsheet or at the end-of-the-term or a copy. Engrade will also convert to a .csv file.
I know there are other nice electronic grade systems; however, I have become accustomed to engrade.
I cannot imagine ever using an actual manual notebook; altho, I do see them in use.
Best wishes, Wynell
Glenn,
I wholeheartedly agree. We juggle so much data that any way to protect the integrity of calculations while also simplifying the process is welcome. This also allows for shifting around weighting in tests themselves. We use Excel when administering skill (practical) tests at my school. this way if we find one area of the exam has too much value placed on it, we can fix it easily and see results of the change quickly.
JanetMarie,
Record keeping is important, and it's true , the electronic grade book age has fully blossomed. I still keep some manual records, and I'll summarize using Excel sometimes. More and more, it's getting so automated I have to compete with other activities to find time to share grade and class performance information with students, one-on-one.
Barry Westling
Before the age of electronic gradebooks, Excel was the only way I kept my grades. I had my grades saved on my laptop/desktop at home, a flash drive and then at school so I had 3 back ups in case something had went wrong. I still use it when I begin tracking progress for interventions that I have implemented for a student.
Glenn,
Yes, Excel is a handy way to track grades and related student activities. Many of the files I review from internal and external sources can be converted to Excel, which I do, because it makes managing and editing the documents so much easier.
Barry Westling
