Automating Grading System for Faculty and Students

Use of some common Microsoft Excel functions, e.g., SUM, AVERAGE, can substantially reduce the drudgery of processing individual student grades to the final form of letter grades.This self developed Excel spreadsheet system may work better than many commercially available grade processing software because of its flexibilities to meet the needs by the department, college, and as well as by any accreditation authority.This spreadsheet system can be modified or updated any time to suit the individual courses and tastes.This paper describes the steps of developing of an Excel grading file assuming some usual weight distribution for a course.It starts with a blank spreadsheet and shows the development of the automatic grading system by using some functions, such as, AVERAGE(), SUM(), COUNTA(), COUNTIF(), LOOKUP(), STDEVA(), MEDIAN(), MODE(), and MIN().Once these functions are in effect, the only job remains for the instructor, is to input the raw numerical scores on homework, project or test into the sheet.With each entry of scores at any time throughout a semester, the sheet shows the current letter grades of students, class statistics as well as graphical displays of various measures of the class.A partially modified electronic file, excluding the student names and any grades, can be distributed to the students at the beginning of a semester.This will make the students aware of their progress status throughout the semester thus guiding them in determining how much extra effort they might need to add in order to obtain a desired letter grade in a course.