A friend on Facebook posted a link to a Clickbait Headline Generator and I found it irresistible. Unfortunately, you can’t plug in your own topic to get the clickbait treatment, but if you click a few times the gimmicks become pretty clear.
I was torn between the headline I chose and “This Spreadsheet Will Prove You’ve Been Assigning Grades Wrong All Your Life!” and “The Secret Spreadsheet That You Need To See Before Exam Season!”
The spreadsheet in question comes from Jeff Stake, who teaches at Indiana Maurer School of Law. Along with his other fields of expertise, Jeff is an expert on law school grading, and has developed a spreadsheet to help assign grades along a proper curve. He gave me a copy a couple of years ago when he was visiting here in Shenzhen, and since then I’ve referred to it as Jeff Stake’s Magic Grading Spreadsheet.
Arthur C. Clarke famously said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to those who don’t know the technology, and for me properly functioning Excel Macros are right up there with warp drives and teleportation, so it seems magical enough to me.
What you do is plug in the raw grades from you your exam or other grading events, select a target mean and decide how many standard deviations you want to allow and Bingo!, you’ve got grades.
For first year required courses we are strongly encouraged to grade along a curve that adheres to a mean, and before Jeff enriched my life getting to that curve involved some rather unscientific and time consuming tweaking.
Jeff has offered to make his spreadsheet available, cost free, to any law profs who want it. You can get Jeff's magical grading spreadsheet here. That version assigns letter grades. He also has a version he created for us here at STL that gives number grades, and if you contact me via the email posted here I can send you that version.
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