Tracking Grades

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In college, when you have questions about your grades, the professors are often unable to answer them. They are too busy, and have too many students to keep track of. It is your responsibility to keep track of your own grades, unless you don’t mind finding out how you’ve done in a class until the final grades are posted.

The easiest way to track all your grades is to set up an Excel spreadsheet with a sheet for each class.

In one column, write a descriptive name for every assignment. In the next column, you will write the grade you got on the assignment. It is very important to include zeros in this tally.

In the next column, write down (as a decimal) the amount that assignment is worth toward your final grade. If you know all the homework assignments are worth 20% of your grade, and there are 5 of them, then each is worth 4%, or .04 as a decimal.

In the last column, calculate your weighted grade for each assignment by multiplying the two previous columns.

Somewhere else on the page (you’ll only need one cell for this), add up all the grades in the last column. This is your average for the semester.

You can use this to see how different things will affect your final grade, as well as knowing your progress throughout the semester. For example, let’s say you want to know what the lowest grade is that you can get on the final and still have a B in the class. Start typing in grades for the final grade, and see what the lowest number is that still gets a B for the final grade.

There are other ways to set up the spreadsheet, of course, but the basic concept is that you multiply the grade on the assignment by how much it was weighted, and add up those numbers to get your final score.

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