Overview

This is actually something a friend of mine showed me spring of my freshman year. It was the spring of her senior year and she was about to graduate summa cum laude with a GPA of 3.92, in other words, she’s brilliant. In class one day we were talking about our grades and how well we needed to do on the upcoming exam to keep our A and she pulled up this beautifully put together excel sheet. Basically she had created her own grade book that calculated her grade every step of the way in every one of her classes. She said this helped her stay on track for As and also took the pressure off of grade release day because she’d been following her grades all along. To show you how to do this, I’ll walk you through my Fall 2020 Grade Tracker.

Overall, this is what my grade tracker looks like. You can see along the bottom are all of my classes, each in their own labeled tab. I have the items that either haven’t been graded yet or I haven’t done yet in red and the items that won’t factor into my overall grade (the dropped scores) in italics. I also like to include a little guide at the bottom of which percentages correlate to which letter grades. All of this information is found in the syllabus of each class, but I like having it all in one place.

Now onto setting up the excel sheet itself. Obviously each class is different so I’ll walk you through my Calculus III grade tracker (which I think is the most intense) and my Praxis grade tracker (which is more of an essay based class).

Calculus III Grade Tracker

So I began by opening up the syllabus for this class. They were nice enough to include a calendar of all our quiz and exam dates (most classes will do this). Since I have exams and quizzes factoring into my overall grade, those were my first two headers. I knew I was going to have 6 exams all out of 80, so I highlighted 6 spaces and typed a red 80 in each one. Then I did the same for the quiz column, except here I didn’t know what each quiz would be out of until the day I took it so I added an additional column next to each quiz score for the total points possible on each quiz.

Then, based on the syllabus, I knew I had homework (we do it through an website called webwork) so I made a column for that. I knew I was going to do every homework until I got 100% so I didn’t bother writing in each week’s webwork scores, if this isn’t your plan, I recommend tracking your homework scores. The same goes for my participation points, the two drops that are seen are days I didn’t go to class and after I missed my two classes, I stopped tracking since I knew I wouldn’t (and couldn’t) miss anymore.

Finally, the last portion of the class that factored into my final grade was the final exam. Obviously, there is only one exam, so one highlighted space. And then I like to add a guess number here (literally a random number of how I think I’ll do on the final) until later in the semester where I can start playing around with what I need on upcoming items for a certain grade. Here, you can see I need a 64 on the final to keep my A in the class.

After I have all my headers set up with the points in each section, I set up the calculating part. For “Total Points Earned” row, I do a sum of each column, here’s what the exam column looks like. As you can see, I’m dropping my lowest exam score which is exam 6 so that number is removed from the overall sum.

For the “Out of” row, this can usually be found in the syllabus. Since I know 5 of my exams will factor into my overall grade, and each exam is worth 80 points, 5 x 80 = 400 so the total points I can earn in the exam column for this class is 400. For the quiz column, since I don’t know the total out of number, I did a sum of the mini column which gave me a total of 45 points possible from quizzes.

Then the tricky part, the weight of each section. In the syllabus they told us:

So, I knew that each part of my grade was weighted differently. To account for that I added the “Weight” row. Then, for my final overall grade, I used this long equation which calculates my overall grade. I know it looks a little complicated, but it’s basically a fancy version of the equation that was provided for me in the syllabus.

Praxis

As you can see, this class is laid out differently than my Calculus III class. Again, I started by pulling up the class syllabus. Based on that, I knew the name and points possible for each assignment. To make it easier to fill in my grades as the semester progressed, instead of labeling each item a number, I wrote the actual name of each essay and then highlighted next to it and in red filled in the points possible for each assignment. Notice here, my professor is a little behind on grading so I have a lot more red in this tab of my grade tracker.

From there, I calculated the “Total Points Earned” row by doing a simple sum of each column. Here, you can see, I don’t have any drops so my sum is very simple.

The “Out of” row is also pretty simply for this class. I added up the total possible points for each assignment which gave me 200 for both columns. Then I used a fancy (and less complicated) equation to calculate my overall grade.

Closing Remarks

I hope you find this as helpful as I have, again, every class is going to look a little different and this will take awhile to put together, but I think it’s worth every second. This has worked really well for me and it helps me wrap my mind around expectations for each class. I think it also important to take a step back sometimes and remember that your grades do not define you. Don’t let the numbers dictate your worth, you are so much more than a grade or an exam score and in the long run, you will be remembered for your smile and your laugh and your compassion, not for your numbers.