Mail Merge your Grading

I’ve written here about how you can use Microsoft Word’s mail merge feature to create individualized assignments for your students. So when my students work on projects, they each get their own version of the problems, each with its own semi-randomly generated numbers. This helps to avoid cheating and helps to promote true collaboration between the students.

Today I turned that Idea around and streamlined the grading/commenting process on a recent student assignment. Instead of writing tons of notes on each student’s packet which they won’t be able to read because the margins are to small, and instead of spending 10 minutes per student with my calculator out doing the arithmetic for a complicated rubric, I created a giant grid in excel.

All of the students’ scores on each problem in the project packet were entered and then merged into the final rubric with a section for notes that I typed out at the end.

For me, this was great for 3 reasons. 1) Students can better understand my feedback because it is clear and typed. 2) It saved me a lot of time since I didn’t have to make 70 individual documents for the rubric. And 3) I got all of the grading data in one place. I noticed that a lot of students struggled with one aspect with the third problem in this assignment, and I never would have had any chance of noticing without having all of the data in excel!