On December 7th, 2015, I wrote an article explaining how you could set up a spreadsheet in Excel to help you predict and analyse students’ grades. Here are a few points to note:

• Even if you have dispensed with grades, the spreadsheet can be amended to take that into account.

• Strictly speaking, it doesn’t tell students’ fortunes! It’s a way of processing a whole load of data at once, such as mock exam results or test results, and showing you whether the grade they achieved in that practice run was the same as what might have been expected from the grades derived from your marks for their their coursework and performance in lessons.

• The benefit of using a spreadsheet is that you will be able to see at a glance, through the magic of conditional formatting, which students have performed better or worse than you predicted. If the differences are marginal, you can ignore them (possibly). If they are significant, you will need to investigate further. Thus what the grade prediction spreadsheet does is save you time, because you only need to focus on the highlighted results.

• I’m fairly certain that the spreadsheet can be adapted for Google Sheets as well, as there are no fancy formulae or programming or script involved.

Interested? Here’s the article. or rather an updated version of it:

Creating a grade prediction system in Excel Note that subscribers to my newsletter, Digital Education, can download a pre-filled and set-up spreadsheet that they can amend as required, such as by changing the students’ names or the grade boundaries. This is available in the Digital Education Supplement.