Are you a teacher? Do you use Excel spreadsheets? Do you use an Excel template? Do you use an online or digital gradebook template?
Like most teachers around Japan, I’m marking exam papers and calculating my final grades.
In the past, I used MyGradebook.com, which was quite good, but is now defunct. I’ve tried other gradebook templates over the years, but I never found one that I could customize the way I wanted to.
Instead, I used plain ol’ Excel spreadsheets. I use a few basic formulas, but nothing too sophisticated. I certainly didn’t try creating my own Excel template or gradebook template. So I was impressed to find this free Excel gradebook template on the web.
This free Excel gradebook template does useful things like
- allow you to assign different weights to different activities and sets of grades;
- allow you to excuse certain students’ assignments;
- set which assignments are part of the final grade;
- has a column for extra credit;
- turns the final grade into a letter grade, using a complicated “IF” and “INDEX” and “MATCH” formula. (I tried adapting it so that it would do the reverse – give me a percentage for a letter grade, but I failed miserably).
Perhaps you’ve already finished your grading, but bookmark the site anyway. It might come in handy next semester. Plus, the site has a ton of other free Excel templates, too.
Here are a few other neat things to make Excel do, using formulas rather than templates:
- how to make it easier to read and tell apart a long-assed row of columns by colouring every other column
- how to count certain words – in my case how to count all the “shusseki 出席” (present) and / or chikoku 遅刻 (tardy) for each student. Atetndance is recorded digitally online, but includes not only “present” but also “tardy” and “absent”. This formula automates the process.
- how to sort rows randomly – great for creating randomly sorted lists of students for test purposes, for instance.
- And here’s a plugin for MSWord that lets you easily created all kinds of text puzzles and activities – Zarb.
